Good post—I was wondering about the electrical infrastructure.
It was built for a different time.
The excrement is gonna hit the rotating blades big time if this EV push continues for any period of time.
Exactly correct. Here's a bit more information supporting that. The Distribution Transformers AND the electric lines from the Distribution Transformer to the houses are all going to be undersized with more than two or three EVs in the neighborhood:
Optimal design of secondary distribution system considering electric vehicles high-power residential fast chargersBy Shady A. El-Batawy and Walid G. Morsi, 07 August 2017
According to Lawrence et al., the traditional design of the Secondary Distribution System (SDS) is usually based on the diversity between residential customers to estimate the Distribution Transformer (DT) rating. The Service Lines (SL) and Service Drops (SD) are calculated to match the selected DT rating. To date and to the best knowledge of the authors, there is no well-defined approach to design SDS components when considering EV charging demand. The Diversity Factor (DF) method that forms the basis for most design standards (traditional design), was derived from old load surveys that go back to the 1960s, which never considered the EV charging in the residential sector. Thus, there is an essential need to properly size the DTs and the secondary lines in residential subdivisions, considering the EV charging demand, and in particular the high-power fast chargers (HPFC), to ensure cost-effectiveness and quality of service (QoS) of the distribution systems.
2.2 Impact of electric vehicle charging
...if we assumed only two EVs are charging from 10 kW residential fast charger from the same DT sized as 50 kVA, the DT loading will increase by 40% (i.e. an increase from 61 kVA to nearly 81 kVA), which may drastically reduce its lifetime. This example demonstrates the dire need to properly size the DTs to avoid premature replacement. In addition, the Voltage Drop (VD) at the last house (i.e., farthest away from the transformer) will be more than doubled (almost 2.5 times, i.e. from 2.1 to 5.4%). Therefore, the secondary line conductors must be properly sized in order to accommodate the additional demand imposed by the EV charging at the design stage of the SDS.
6.4 Real secondary distribution system This Section presents the implementation of the proposed design approach on a real system, which is depicted in Fig. 7. The system consists of 10 customers supplied from a 50 kVA DT. Considering the charging of EVs, the DT's size increased from 50 to 125 kVA, while the SL and SD conductor sizes increased from 300 and 211.6 to 556.5 and 477 kcmil, respectively. The proposed optimal new design is able to reduce the Transformer Loss of Life (LOL) to be within the normal limits as shown in Table 9.