I guess one more cynical read of the same suggestion is that, having failed to gather the political will to modernize our power infrastructure, we're grasping at straws by suggesting that we can piggyback off of private consumption to cobble together some of the same benefits.
Ding ding. Ideas like this are fantastic and I believe should be pursued. But it's ultimately going to be a band-aid (and a costly, fragile one at that), not a holistic solution.
