TL;DR - you can heat or cool your house when power is cheaper (if your energy supplier has time based cost) and you can shut off your HVAC during the high cost times and your insulation is the temperature “battery”
Similarly you can only run your hot water tank during non peak times and it may be able to satisfy all your hot water needs even when it’s not actively heating the water.
That being said, Technology Connections does a great deep dive into numerous topics and he is a fun host. Most videos, while very long, are great edutainment.
Yes, there’s a lot in there. I wish his side mention of having an insulated box of bricks that is heated up during the night and opened to heat the house during the day had more information.
This concept was already actively used but mostly abandoned. A friend of mine has a (in Germany) so called “Nachtspeicher Heizung” (lit. translates to night storage heating), the English term is storage heater. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater
It is an electric heating system that has high heat capacity stones in it. If you turn it on it will use a fan to output hot air. It was invented to use the overproduction of fossil fuel plants during the night when demand was low. They have a separate meter and cheaper tariffs. With the switch to renewables they could have a second chance.
I believe the main challenge is making then somewhat smart to only store when the energy is cheap, in the past it was a very simple time based system.
On a smaller scale, you can use several gallons of water as a thermal buffer (“battery”) for a greenhouse, grow tent or small room. No, it’s not convenient to have gallons of water around, but it can be useful for growing things that need to stay in a specific temperature range over the course of a day.
For example, I’ll be doing this for my mushroom grow tent as we get into winter here. (Lows of 35°F up to 80°F during the day.) Mycelium development and/or fruiting is partially controlled with temperature.
Just so you know, everybody: this isn’t an article. It’s a 24 minute video.
You could also do similar things in the industry. Only have metal production sites or heavy railway transport operate when solar energy is cheap.
