When's the last time someone and 10 of their neighbors dried their hair for 12 straight hours, though? It's not the instantaneous power draw from a single plug that people are worried about but rather the aggregate draw.
I think it’s perhaps mostly still within the margins that grids are built to tolerate. We’ll need to generate more electricity, but we might not need to rewrite all our streets. Also, it won’t be a step change, it will be gradual. NEW cars will be EVs by 2030 (or whenever), but most cars will still be old cars.
So granted not everywhere has enough sun or wind potential. But building out a ton of renewables compliments building out a ton of EV chargers and cars. Definitely worth upgrading infrastructure to handle. V2L makes it even more of a direct compliment.
There’s an important relationship between energy available per capita and “health” of civilization. So I saw we do it all.
That turns out not to be a problem in the us, because the increased electricity use by expected ev charging is contained in our 2 or 3% increase per year. I expected this will be true for other places. Also in the us you find that people are using unneeded capacity at night.
More like a tumble dryer, running almost continuously. Fridges/freezers, even huge US-sized ones, don't use that much power. I measured the average consumption of my under-counter fridge at less than 10W.
A pass through water heater would be a good example (running 7 hours daily). Not many apartments would have a capacity to add a new water heater of such type, even for human use (10-30 minutes per day, spaced out across the building in time, not all simultaneously at the same hours).
Why? Comparing the power consumption of an EV on charge to a fridge is a very unfair comparison.
If you drive 200 EV miles per week, you need 60kWh per week, or about 360W continuous.
At approx. 4.5kWh per cycle, that's 13 tumble dryer loads per week. Even that seems an unfair comparison - I'm not sure how many people run 2 loads per day every day.
I was hyperbolic in my original comment, but that's still several hours of tumble drying every day.
Colloquially, if I had a household that ran their tumble dryer twice a day every day, I might say it's "running almost continuously".
Which domestic appliance do you think is a fair comparison to the power needs of an EV? As I've already pointed out, in a very rational way, you would have to be a very heavy user of your tumble dryer to make even that a fair comparison.