Electric cars will end up being a much better choice for this application. Even today, there are a number of companies selling connected EVSE’s (“chargers”) tha

Electric cars will end up being a much better choice for this application. Even today, there are a number of companies selling connected EVSE’s (“chargers”) that can be grid-tied to modify the charging rate on demand. The J1772 charge port standard includes a carrier signal that tells the car the max current its allowed to draw, so it’s just a matter of modulating that signal as needed. If there are 100,000 EV’s each charging at 5kW across the state of California every night, that’s 500MW of demand that can be shaped pretty broadly - assume each car needs 4 hours of charging between 9 PM and 7 AM, you have plenty of room to adjust rate and timing. In the future, it’s likely that EV’s will be designed with bidirectional charging capability, at which point they will be able to return power to the grid in times of high demand, acting as a giant distributed battery.