Re: Fast chargers
Everyone homes in on DC fast-charging because it looks most like the way you fill up a petrol car, but it’s really not how the majority of EV recharging will happen. Private cars spend 95% of their time parked, so given the ubiquity of electrical supply, that parked-time is when they will charge. Any residence with a driveway can use AC home charging at 7kW (rising to 22kW in countries with 3-phase domestic supplies), which is cheaper and more convenient than forecourt charging. AC charging can be rolled out across pay-parking facilities, commercial premises and workplaces too without much techical difficulty. On-street charging is still a challenge, but it’s a very solvable problem: the difficulties are mostly political and commercial, not technological.
You say filling up with petrol is “convenience”, but is it really? Having the car charge up overnight — or while you do your day’s work— is in a different league when it comes to convenience: just unplug, and go. No wasting your time detouring to a station, or queueing at the till... and it’s cheaper too.
The only place where fast-charging becomes relevant is for very long distance journeys (exceeding 75% of your battery’s range). But with current capacities, those journeys are very rare. Yes, there are people out there who have to drive more than 200 miles at a go, but they really are outliers. For them, a diesel car is still the best option, but eventually EVs will catch up there too.
The electrical grid is entirely able to accommodate EVs. Demand on the grid today is not in any way constant, and it has to be able to operate at a peak that is far in excess of the normal loading. Nightly charging actually solves a problem that has plagued electricity generators since Edison’s day: the most efficient way to operate most types of generation is to run them continuously, but demand fluctuates wildly over the day and week, and if you over generate, you have to dump the power.. (Search for “duck curve”, and follow the articles you find to learn more about this topic).
EVs actually help the grid. They aren’t steady-state dumb-loads, they have intelligence, and are all capable of negotiating with the supply (the charging connector has a serial datacomms link, and the protocols used on it include a Vehicle-to-Grid facility). Right now, you can schedule cars to take electricity at any time of your choosing (to reduce your home bill), but there’s no technological impediment to prevent the electrical utilities and vehicles negotiating their charging periods to react to instantaneous power surpluses in the grid. There’s also the prospect of using your EV battery as a domestic demand buffer, for which the utility will reward you with cheaper electricity.
Regarding capacity, it might interest you to know that domestic electricty demand peaked in the early 1990s, and has declined since (Datacentres have picked up some of the slack, but not all). A lot of infrastructure was put in place based on that level of demand, and mass adoption of EVs will just bring things back towards those projections.
But, it’s not like grid infrastructure is immutable once installed. Unless you’re misfortunate enought to live in Texas, the electrical grid is constantly maintained and expanded to meet demand for electricity; and it’s not like a hundred million EVs are just going to wink into existence and plug in next week: the transition will take decades, and decades is long enough to adapt any grid.