The author mentions demand charges where a substantial part of the bill is based on the peak capacity available to you at the most congested time rather than energy unit charges. In many places, large customers already pay this way.
In France, which has low marginal production but high capacity costs due to its nuclear fleet, even residential customers have been charged this way for a long time. It's easy to charge anyone this way now with smart meters but the way that EDF did it historically is that your meter has a circuit breaker set to the peak that you've paid for. Go over, the breaker trips and you need to reduce load and reset. (Of course there is a safety circuit breaker with higher rating as well). If you want more capacity, you pay for it and they come and install a bigger breaker.
I do think that future electricity networks, energy will be cheap most of the time but peak power at congested times will be very expensive. That's pretty inevitable with the grid mixes being proposed since the grid will be net over-supplied most of the time (energy very cheap) and very occasionally undersupplied (energy very, very expensive). This asymmetry arises from the asymmetry between the economic cost of too much energy (linear economic loss to the producer) and too little (non-linear loss to everyone). This is intuitive: A grid that has too much energy 1% of the time is fine, not enough 1% of the time is three days of blackouts a year.
In France, which has low marginal production but high capacity costs due to its nuclear fleet, even residential customers have been charged this way for a long time. It's easy to charge anyone this way now with smart meters but the way that EDF did it historically is that your meter has a circuit breaker set to the peak that you've paid for. Go over, the breaker trips and you need to reduce load and reset. (Of course there is a safety circuit breaker with higher rating as well). If you want more capacity, you pay for it and they come and install a bigger breaker.
I do think that future electricity networks, energy will be cheap most of the time but peak power at congested times will be very expensive. That's pretty inevitable with the grid mixes being proposed since the grid will be net over-supplied most of the time (energy very cheap) and very occasionally undersupplied (energy very, very expensive). This asymmetry arises from the asymmetry between the economic cost of too much energy (linear economic loss to the producer) and too little (non-linear loss to everyone). This is intuitive: A grid that has too much energy 1% of the time is fine, not enough 1% of the time is three days of blackouts a year.