You can get smart meters in Aus now with time of use metering. What needs to happen now is that those meters get a simple, non-cloud-connected way to let your appliances know when is a good time to start up.

So for hard wired devices like your hot water heater or your pool pump you could have a simple relay-like device in your fusebox that can be set to “turn on below X cents per kWh” and it will switch them as needed.

Your air conditioner could have a linked IR remote that turns it on early in the day of power is cheap and chills the house for the afternoon heat or runs it a bit cooler than usual if it is already running.

Your fridge or freezer could have an “extra chill” setting.

Your washing machine and dryer could have simple “start now” “pause now” interfaces and they could just operate during the day whenever.

All this could be done with some newer version of the X10 protocol, and it would be great to get something like that standardised and widespread.