[Knaapje]

For sure, that sounds very doable, though there are still some hurdles, like why would a consumer partake in that scheme? There has to be some reward for offering flexible consumption of energy for grid stability. There also needs to be a controller/arbiter that does the scheduling.

[hollow-moe]

Economic incentives, we already have a system of low/high hours with different prices to motivate people to run their big appliances at times of low usage. There's usually a window during the day and another in the middle of the night. But why implement this whole system when OEMs already connect their devices to your wifi and can force you to use an app to setup custom running times...

[Knaapje]

Well, why would a consumer submit themselves to such a system when they can run their appliances directly?

Additionally, that pricing mechanism doesn't work for reasons outlined in the article, it will actually concentrate energy consumption when consumers delegate activation of devices to a controller that automatically starts it at the moment of lowest cost.

Furthermore, when devices like electric vehicles become even more prevalent, we need some kind of balancing mechanism because of grid capacity, and traditional pricing is not it.