Hopefully this will stay as it is. Environmentally BEVs don’t make much sense. And there is not enough electricity capacity (fossil or regenerative) to cover the need of millions of electric cars.
Someone may have brought this up, but the grid is built to handle peak maximum demand. For large parts of the day, the peaking units sit idle waiting for demand to go up. If electric cars were mostly charging during off peak times, there is plenty of capacity to handle most if not all that will be on the road over the next decade or two.
Another thing that most people don't think about is it takes between 4KW and 12KWh of energy to refine 1 gallon of gasoline. The sources differ on the exact amount and it almost certainly varies depending on the grade of oil going in. With modern oil supplies, it's probably closer to 10 KWh on average. Almost all that energy comes off the grid. If we're refining less gasoline, that's around 10KWh per gallon available for something else, like charging EVs.
On top of that, there is a boom going on in renewable energy that will increase overall capacity faster than electric cars will be adopted. I don't believe renewables will completely replace older energy sources because the energy per sq m of space for all renewables except hydro is much lower than any conventional power plant and while solar panels on houses will help, there are places which are going to need more energy than can be generated on site. However, the dirtier, more expensive power plants will probably be shutting down in favor of better sources.
Robert Llewellyn's Fully Charged did an episode where he talked about the strain on the grid if every car in Britain was electric and when the numbers were run, it could be done with the existing grid as long as most cars charged off peak.
On the other side of the equation is the work of Caimbridge Physics professor David MacKay who unfortunately died, but he argued that while he was all in favor of maximizing renewables, they wouldn't be the answer for all our energy needs and we will need something to supplement. Modern civilization simply needs too much energy per person. He estimated it was 250 KWh/day/person in the US and about 150 KWh/day/person in the UK (and most of western Europe was similar). I've done some research on my own and the US is down to around 220 KWh/day/person. Americans currently burn about 50 KWh/day/person in gasoline (including refining). If Americans replaced gasoline cars with electrics and drove the same, it would probably drop us down to the 180-190 range. But it would shift some burden from oil to the grid.
MacKay does make the point that each country's energy situation is different. There is not enough open land or sunlight in the UK to go solar practically, but it's very feasible in the American Southwest where there is a lot of vacant land and lots of sunlight. Norway, Quebec, and the American Northwest have plentiful hydro power, but in places that are flatter and/or drier, that's not possible.
