We have a F-150 lightning, and charge it on a 12A, 120V charger. It’s fine for 6-10 trips a week. If I commuted in it to an office without a charger it wouldn’t be fine, but a smaller commuter car would be. (The truck gets 2.5 miles/kWh, commuter cars are at 4-5).

I’m sure we are outliers, but still.

Put another way: growing up with incandescent bulbs, I remember light switches that would turn on 6-8 lamp track lights. That’s half the current our EV charger draws. We had a space heater that drew more than our EV charger currently does.

Houses and neighborhoods are still built with electrical systems provisioned for pre-LED, pre-induction/heatpump workloads. They certainly have enough slack for everyone to plug in a level one or two charger simultaneously.

That's true enough at the level of individual households. If the whole neighborhood switches to EVs, the power grid in general might not be built to handle it.

(Personally I don't expect this will be that big a deal, since switching to EVs is something that happens one household at a time over many years. So, it shouldn't come as a sudden shock, and its something the utilities can make long term plans about. It just means power utilities need to be on the ball about not putting off infrastructure upgrades, and it means somewhat higher electricity prices for residential customers.)

If you've been assuming you need to replace all the oil with the same amount of electrical power then you're seriously wrong.

Electric motors are extremely efficient over a wide speed range, whereas combustion engines aren't very efficient even in their relatively narrow optimal range and the arrangement needed to translate that power into motion further reduces overall efficiency.

While replacing the energy 1:1 would entail roughly doubling US electrical generation you actually want to replace the function and that's maybe 20-25% increase. It's not a trifle but it's very do-able. Especially if you time-shift car charging so that it's happening when humans are asleep and there's slack in the network.

You charge your phone while you sleep right? If you're used to filling up a car at a gas station it can feel weird but you can charge a car while you sleep too.

> We are a net oil exporter.

That's a problem and behaviour with poor long term consequences.

Bit like Columbia being a net cocaine exporter.

> I have no idea

There are annual IEA reports on global energy demand and supply by means and country.

Those looking ahead to sustainable energy are improving technology and infrastructure to better utilize the great fusion reactor in the sky.

Certainly the US could use a plan for charging infrastructure and grid improvements- it's currently lagging both the EU and China there.

eg: Electric vehicle charging - https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...

( Just the current trends in public charging stations, not trends in supply )

Full fleet of EVs would be 20-30 % of our annual electricity. Ain't no way we can acomodate for that on any near term timeline especially if you add in all the additional demand on electricity from AI/compute.

Now if had money as a country and had a recent history of building actual physical things for a reasonable cost. Yes may we could get there -- but current state of affairs - broke and limited manufacturing ability.

Yeah I'm talking more like half that. $15K for a basic, no-frills hatchback type EV.

I personally buy used, and pay about a quarter of that or less when I buy a car.