However to suggest that once they can afford luxuries that are most cheaply acquired by going beyond a single-household electricity setup that they won't continue to do without them over some attachment to not having a grid, that claim seems almost certainly completely incorrect.

It also needs to be said that electricity isn't just used for "wasteful things", it's used for making things more efficient, so that people can do more. The article talks about this in the context of lighting, but it's no less true in the context of washing machines, and dishwashers, and microwaves, and air-conditioning [1], and mechanized transportation (electric bikes/cars/...), and ...

[1] http://corporatemechanical.com/how-air-conditioning-impacts-...

Heating and cooling (and the computers that manage the batteries, which draw about 200W, including internet!) is hard to timeshift, but everything else is easy to move to sunny days.

Anyway, on those sunny days, electricity is literally free. I wish I could just dump it into a magic box that pulled charcoal out of the atmosphere.

The lightbulb moment was realizing that of I did manage to pull a ton (or 15) of carbon out of the air by whatever method, I would then have to move that carbon... Somewhere. I had been looking especially at algae bio reactors, which leave you with a particularly soupy waste situation. :)

One can shift them by at least few hours using theorem-insulated water tank. It costs money but likely will be cheaper (and safer) than Lithium batteries.