TOU pricing is pretty widespread at this point; I have it in a medium-sized city in Canada, and intentionally run laundry (electric dryer) in the evening when power is half the cost of daytime use. With EVs coming online and being set up to charge at night, it would definitely be nice to have a minute by minute spot pricing scheme, though, then you'd basically have a mechanism for using the chargers and other intelligent devices on the consumption side as an intelligent buffer.
It's goofy, but another one is situations where you have a lot of stored heat energy, thinking like pools, hot tubs, hot water heaters, etc— all those things could be activated in response to spot pricing with pretty simple policies (I want a shower of at least X degrees at 7am, I want the hot tub at at least Y degrees by 9pm, etc).
Even in that world, you'd still want a way to manage the load through the night so that you don't have all the chargers clicking on at 11pm and then when the cars are full have a few hours later, demand craters until morning.
With renewables the incentives for load management become even higher (per this article). The real next step after second-by-second billing would be setting up chargers with backfeeding capabilities/policies, so that you have an arrangement with your employer to charge your car at work on cheap daytime solar power, sell it back into the grid during the evening rush, then charge up again on overnight base load. Most EV batteries are way overspecced for what people need in daily use, so as long as you have a special "charge me to full and stay there" mode you can switch into, there'd be no reason (other than a bit of wear and tear) not to cycle your battery like this.
I think your household electricity prices just need to reflect real market prices. For example there were times in germany this year, with negative power prices, because the wind was blowing strong and all the wind plants generating more than anyone needed.
But for me as a customer, the price was as high as allways.
But if customers could react to that (automatically), you could have all sorts of jobs waiting for it. Bitcoin mining, dryer, charging batteries, freezer full power ... would be good for the grid, too, to balance it.
With Octopus you can go to an Agile tariff, where you're paying exactly what the market rate is, which means that frequently at night you are being paid for using electricity(the rate per kWh goes into negative). I know a few people who have it with an electric car, and it means that at certain times you are being paid to charge your car. It's crazy. But also it means that at peak times the cost can be as high as 25-30p/kWh
There are apps that can automate this whole process for you, monitoring the charge your cars needs each night and the dynamic energy prices either on an Economy 7 or Agile tariff and then controls the charging to optimise the price. If you're car needs less charge than your off peak rate time period then it will charge at the lowest carbon times. https://ev.energy
Smart Meters and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) still have about half of all meters to go in the US. Real time pricing for the customer requires cutting through a few intermediaries designed to keep the grid and utility bills stable, much at the cost of the environment.
Texas energy markets are where all the fun on this front is really happening.
I've wanted to have realtime pricing like that for a while, it seems to be becoming available again.
I honestly thought that was what the advanced electricity meter roll-out was going to do; but it seems not.
More direct energy cost to service price charged seems like a good thing in general.