  Growth of intermittent renewable energy and climate change make it
increasingly difficult to manage electricity demand variability. Centralized
storage can help but is costly. An alternative is to shift demand. Cooling and
heating demands are substantial and can be economically shifted using thermal
storage. To estimate what thermal storage, employed at scale, might do to
reshape electricity loads, we pair fine-scale weather data with hourly
electricity use to estimate the share of temperature-sensitive demand across 31
regions that span the continental United States. We then show how much
variability can be reduced by shifting temperature-sensitive loads, with and
without improved transmission between regions. We find that approximately three
quarters of within-day, within-region demand variability can be eliminated by
shifting just half of temperature-sensitive demand. The variability-reducing
benefits of shifting temperature-sensitive demand complement those gained from
improved interregional transmission, and greatly mitigate the challenge of
serving higher peaks under climate change.
