I understand convenience, laziness and inertia (resisting change) but I also think changing the times when we click "power on" is a simpler solution than mining millions of tons of more lithium, no?
Smart demand-response may yet become a thing, but it's not yet a commodity product. You need a system to send out "turn off" notifications, and a system for measuring that in realtime, and a system for paying people. Some grids _do_ have this, but only for very large consumers.
All power hungry devices should at least have that capability (maybe other than the kettle, lol). This is literally a cost of $20 hardware in many cases.
You would have to completely rebuild most of the manufacturing industry, as many plants have startup times measured in hours or days.
It'd be cheaper to just build nuclear.
So yes, we could survive without power at night. We just have to rebuild every building.
As a long-term ideal I don't disagree with you. We should be building for resilience. But that's not a solution to climate change.
I like to heat my home during winter. We have a (modern, highly efficient) heat pump, so we need most electricity during January, just when the least amount of solar insolation is available [1] and when it sometimes stays cloudy and below 0°C continuously for days. But I guess we'll just have to be more flexible and turn off heating, light, and electricity in general for a week, no big deal.
[1] I wonder if there's a causal relation between cold weather and low solar insolation?
Including other comments on this exact thread where people did exactly that.
That's already the case – the actual heat pump only runs intermittently, on demand. This happens quasi-randomly, so you automatically get some load balancing across a city.
The problem is that this is intra-day load balancing, which doesn't help one bit if there are several days of low supply (windless winter days).
It also isn't synced to supply, instead most people have it set to different temperatures based on when they are home. It would be better to cool or heat the house based on supply. You want the house between 21 and 24c, you don't care when the system is on.