Hopefully people are looking for productive ways to use intermittently free electricity.
I bet plenty of businesses would be more than willing to equip their parking lot with chargers given the right tax incentive. Have the electricity company give out charging cards so that EV charging can be combined with your residential power bill, and add a 5-9 Duck Curve Discount. Make the charging speed electricity company controlled for additional demand shifting possibilities.
incentivize e-mopeds and ebikes, both of which have far lower energy use than a car ever will.
incentivize trains and buses, both of which have far lower energy use as long as they're even slightly filled (a 15-ton bus with only 7 passengers will still have better energy-efficiency than a 2-ton car).
The latter might require building out more public transport in the first place, though.
On the other hand, plenty of people already drive to work and park there. Plugging in your EV while parking at work vs. plugging in your EV while parking at home is an absolutely minuscule change for most people, which means it is quite likely to actually be picked up.
I know that, for example, Iceland does a lot of the world's aluminum smelting (ore gets shipped in from Australia, for example) b/c the cost of electricity is so low (all the geothermal).
Edit: For socal, desalination seems like a good option. Also maybe something involving the recent updates to lithium mining in the Salton Sea...? No clue how much power that takes, and, it sounded like it was paired with geothermal plants, so...
And we're no longer looking at what you could believe 20 years ago, a world where energy costs on average 4-5 times more than it does today. Actually looks like energy will cost less. We definitely have issues around transition, utilities don't want to get caught out and go bankrupt.
The real problem they face is an inability to grow revenue with a cost+ model and dropping production costs.
They have to be as inefficient as possible to drive up costs further, but this opens the door for competition that isn't playing this game.
I think this decade will see many more municipalities getting into the game, and a huge regulatory fight as utilities try to stop them.
Does California permit variable-cost electricity to consumers? If so, just charge a battery in the day and let it run at night.
Where it works well is in the opposite direction: You buy the hardware and use it 90%+ of the time but shut it down during a supply shortfall. Then you're making good use of the hardware and helping to amortize the cost of additional generation capacity but save the grid from running out of power in an emergency.