Engineers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have been developing a technology known as "Gridwise" that enables household appliances to adjust themselves on the fly in response to the overall power requirements of the power grid. When the grid is reporting high demand a controller sends orders to the appliances to cease some of the appliance’s high-energy operations that could be temporarily delayed, such as a refrigerator's defrost cycle. Their studies show that the Gridwise system could potentially reduce power requirements by 15%. Check out this video from Sciencentral.com, my favourite quote is from Pacific Northwest's Rob Pratt, who I envision as somewhat of a Star Wars fan, when he says the the controllers "... sense a disturbence in the power grid all on their own, and they can just take themselves out of action just very temporarily"
