> To conclude based on this that the grid is broken or that electrical cars (which mostly charge at night) are going to result in the grid deteriorating further makes no sense through.

No, that is not what leads to the conclusion. The conclusion is based on two things: Physics and mathematics.

What is happening now is merely a preview of things to come if we don't have the right conversations or people, as you are doing, dismiss the warnings some of us are issuing without making any real effort to understand.

About five years ago I designed and built (as in, I did it myself) a 13 kW solar array at home. Far more than we needed to supply the house. The plan was to use some of that for electric vehicles once they became viable. Note I didn't just say "affordable". The term "viable" is meant to include the entire ecosystem. As a comparison, a gasoline-powered vehicle is viable because you can easily refuel it without even thinking about it and it can be maintained and repaired anywhere and almost by anyone.

Anyhow. This led to me devoting a lot of time for about a year to try to understand energy, climate change and electric transportation realities. What I mean by that is that I invested time and effort seeing just how well the math and physics of what we were (and are) being told, actually align.

What I discovered was a surprise to me: They do not.

I wrote some code to simulate power requirements for a varying scale of EV adoption, all the way up to 300 million vehicles --our current fleet. The simulation predicted a need of between 900 GW and 1400 GW in addition to existing capacity. The current US capacity is 1200 GW. In other words, we need to double our power generation capacity and double (or more) our ability to transport power. As it turns out, this prediction was reasonably accurate.

One of the often hand-wavy things people talk about or write in articles is energy, rather than power. This is a huge mistake. Energy is power delivered over time. One can make outlandish claims about energy while ignoring the time element.

When, in a state like California, you have 31 million [0] EV's plug in to charge at, say, 6:00 PM every night, what you need is power, instantaneously, not energy. The fact that you generated <pick a number> of energy in the prior n days means nothing in that moment unless the energy was stored for delivery as power to each car in that instant.

What I discovered is that, at the end of the day, the hand-wavy stories just don't hold up. As a hypothetical, if you consume ten days worth of stored energy in one to nine nights, you are still short. The truth turns out to be that the EV problem, ultimately, is about power, not energy.

One way I think of this is that all 13 million+ households in CA [1] suddenly get TWO 5-ton air conditioning systems that are turned on every night at 6 PM for several hours. That's what we are talking about. And, no, we don't have the power and, if we had it, we could not deliver it.

So, yes, very much so: The grid is broken (in that it just can't cope with these loads) and a large installed base of electric cars will cause severe grid deterioration in multiple ways.

We can stick our heads in the sand an pretend this isn't so today because EV owners live in a privileged environment where they can take as much power as they need from the system and people, for the most part, don't notice any issues. I am going to guess that if we double the installed base of EV's in CA --which is mostly concentrated in large urban areas-- people will start to notice and this will lead to very interesting outcomes. I could get ugly for EV owners in so many ways.

I don't know how else to say it. I have written a lot about this. People prefer to be dismissive and continue to exist in ignorance of our future reality. We can't even build a high speed train and now we are talking about a transition to EV's that will require a doubling our our power generation and delivery capacity (this is absolutely indisputable). Why aren't we talking about mass adoption of nuclear power? It's because the easy political gains are not there, that's why.

[0] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/m...

[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/CA/RHI725221