Yep.
Another goddamn liberal arts major, telling us how things will work in their paradise where everyone will ride around in flying cars powered by unicorn farts.
Riiiiight.
Your supposition on things like HVAC is correct. About half of all power consumed in the US goes into induction motors, such as you find in HVAC compressors and blowers, air handlers, pumps, etc. When you start up a three phase induction motor, there is either a very large spike in current requirements, or... the motors have to be put onto a “drive” that controls how quickly the motor starts up. These used to be called “soft starts” but since the advents of variable frequency drives for 3-phase motors, it is all integrated into the one unit.
Well, that’s all very well and nice, and power companies have been handing out incentives for years for industrial users to get their power factors corrected, to install soft starts or VFD’s, etc, but none of this will matter if we start having huge economic incentives to bring loads online and dump them offline at once as power rates spike up or down.
People who have a little more clue about this than idealistic liberal arts majors know that what they’re effectively proposing amounts to an open-loop control system. And those are difficult to make stable... very difficult.
There are already real world examples of people all starting their loads up at the same time.
The solution, have the electric company control the switching on of the loads instead of the consumer.
Never a solution that doesn’t involve big government or central control.