Richard S. wrote:Well I'm just a dumb amateur electrician but from my understanding if its not used they can't store it. Where it goes I don't know. I'd imagine they ramp a lot of power stations down at night. A lot of areas have different rates for during the night and day. My uncle for example has an electric hot water heater that heats water at night to store it for the day use to take advantage of the lower rate.
The different rates for night are because they have excess generating capacity at night. The power company pays the same for men and taxes at the power station regardless of how much it produces. They have to have facilities to generate peak load. Therefore, they offer lower rates at night when demand is down to encourage use of power at night. There isn't excess wasted electric. Only excess capacity.