I think pre-cooling would be a viable solution to cooling houses in the after afternoon, early evening. There are some issues though. Pre-cooling means cooling the house to a lower temperature during the early afternoon when the heat pump is working against higher outside temps. There is some loss of efficiency from that. Eyeballing COP curves makes it seem like you'd need 20-25% more power.

What I think. Demand metering in a solar grid would likely motivate people enough to cut late afternoon and early evening usage. So I think policy and rate setting can match infrastructure and it's costs to demand.