First of all thanks for your extensive answers and interest in this topic :) > There's an argument to be made that one should move loads to 1pm since then the

First of all thanks for your extensive answers and interest in this topic :) > There's an argument to be made that one should move loads to 1pm since then the country could increase build out of solar energy That's a very good argument and I think you got the point of what I'm trying to convey: Marginal carbon intensity is a nice idea but extremely hard to compute in practice because you would need to anticipate decisions of many actors. Average carbon intensity, on the other hand, is a very good metric for shifting loads because you increase demand at times where there is many renewables feeding into the grid. What would be even more interesting is actively exploiting the fact that sometimes energy is actually "for free" e.g. wind turbines are sometimes "shut off" if the grid cannot handle more energy because they are easier, faster, and hence cheaper to start/stop than fossil-fired power plants. I guess there is a high correlation between these events and low average carbon intensity, but I don't have any data on it. > of course you could just ignore the need for more hardware I completely see your point, but the available capacity could just be a hard constraint to load shifting efforts. An approach that is different and that I just came across recently is the Zero-carbon could (http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~aachien/lssg/research/zccloud/ http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~aachien/lssg/research/zccloud...). It's covered also in this talk: https://youtu.be/rX5H0oCxnfc https://youtu.be/rX5H0oCxnfc. It's a very holistic view on the topic and somewhat overcomes the problem that we cannot reliably compute marginal carbon intensity for the entire power grid, by just optimizing for the stranded power in parts of the grid