Abstract A signi?cant portion of the electricity network capacity is built to run only a few days a year when demand peaks. As a result, expensive power generation plants and equipment costing millions of dollars are sitting idle most of the time, which increases costs for everyone. We present randomized load control, a simple distributed approach for scheduling smart appliances. Randomized load control schedules the start time of appliances that are programmed to run within a speci?ed time window, so that the aggregate load achieves a given ideal load. Our results show that we do achieve the given ideal load to a great extent. This is remarkable as the approach is completely distributed and preserves customer privacy as the scheduling happens within each house or building separately.