They have been around for decades in the US as well. Industry uses far more electricity than residential, so the focus of managing peak use has been factories t

They have been around for decades in the US as well. Industry uses far more electricity than residential, so the focus of managing peak use has been factories to shift energy use to off-peak hours, something that the average person would never know about. On the residential side though, our utitly (Xcel Energy in MN), has a rate reduction program where they installed a power cycling device on our central AC unit that shuts it off for 10 minutes every hour.