Disclosed are various embodiments of load shedding techniques for a guided surface wave power delivery system. In one embodiment, among others, a guided surface wave receive structure is configured to obtain electrical energy from a guided surface wave traveling along a lossy conducting medium. A user device is coupled to the guided surface wave receive structure as an electrical load, where a load shedding application of the user device is configured to receive load shedding instructions from a controller device coupled to the guided surface waveguide probe and is configured to regulate user device consumption of the electrical energy provided by the guided surface wave.