Every second appliance has Wifi nowadays - but we need an industry standard that allows consumers to control usage based on price, perhaps by assigning specific appliances in your house to your energy retailer web account, and then allowing the retailer/grid operator to control when they are turned off and on (or to adjust their energy intensity) in return for a monthly discount.

For example just by heating and cooling houses a few hours before people get home, we can shift a lot of demand towards the middle of the day when solar power is abundant, and away from evening peaks.

We're definitely going to need something like this for widespread EV usage, where cars can potentially upload power to the grid.

Government has a role here in setting standards. They are the ones who get blamed for high energy prices or outages, anyway.