That is interesting. At the Smart Energy conference I spoke about, one Canadian utility that has implemented smart meters and Time of Use pricing found virtually no evidence that people were reducing their consumption. If anything, load was shifted from peak periods to the off peak periods on the weekend. You would have been a great example of what they were hoping for.

I am curious though. If you are using about .09 or .10 an hour in total (for the brief period I looked at the graph), how were you able to achieve such high savings? Did you get rid of unnecessary appliances, or simply find ways to reduce consumption?

I had found some reasonably scientific research done a while back in a pilot program showing 15% reduction by otherwise passive people. I can't find the study now, so I could be full of it :-)

Actually, shifting to off-peak is a good outcome since fewer spinning reserve plants (usually the least efficient) are needed. But, as you say, not really the desired outcome.

My baseline use tends to run at about 300W. We first did obvious things like replace some of our lighting with CFL, and we got rid of an old chest freezer we didn't need. We changed behavior through learning to turn off lights when we left a room. There were some no-brainer things (my stereo apparently allows multi-room hookups, and if you have the buttons turned on, it uses several hundred watts to do nothing. I replaced a fileserver + routers with an Apple Time Capsule and saved 100+ watts. We use the dryer differently. And we installed a few BITS smart strips. The reason our savings are high is partly because I live in the Boston area, where our electricity rate is currently $0.19/kWh, I think. Bottom line was that we made a lot of little changes. I have written about most of them in my personal blog, called fivepercent.us if you're interested.