That confusion you feel stems from a misunderstanding about the electrical grid.
Hundreds of millions of people aren’t all living in lockstep and many of them are trying to save money using demand pricing. A family might go on a long trip and use fast charging, but every family in the country isn’t going to be going on a trip that same weekend and try to charge at the same second.
right, but everyone within a region commutes at roughly the same time, had roughly the same weekend schedule, etc. etc.
There was that story a couple years ago about England's electrical grid and specific localities being stressed because apparently all of England would turn on their teapots at the same time after a TV show ended.
EV’s aren’t microwaves, you can plug in to the grid at 7PM and not start charging until 2AM. So yes, demand isn’t absolutely constant but it turns out it’s even better than constant as demand for EV charging decreases when other sources peak.
Some people charge at home, others at the office, and some exclusively at fast chargers.
I think the important thing is lost. Average is useless for determining if a grid (and it is not THE grid, since localities have bottlenecks) can support a load in time. Maybe it can, but the on statistic given as evidence is an average, which doesn't help explain anything one way OR the other.
Also, I'm not sure I can get behind the logic about peak times either way until we discuss how rolling blackouts would affect this.
It probably sounds like I have a side in this, but I do not. I do not currently own an EV, but that is due to up front costs (I do not even buy ICE cars new, the prices are insane for an asset that only depreciates). My daily commute makes me want to own one, actually. However, I do have an interest in making sure we are not saying flamboyant things like "electric cars cause less indirect pollution" without making even an attempt to quantify it, or saying unhelpful things about how the average load of an EV relates to whether a grid can support a lot of them.
Hundreds of millions of people aren’t all living in lockstep and many of them are trying to save money using demand pricing. A family might go on a long trip and use fast charging, but every family in the country isn’t going to be going on a trip that same weekend and try to charge at the same second.