What I hear in the Smart Grid meetings from folks associated with the electrical vehicle aspect is that one of these cars will on average roughly double a household's consumption of electricity -- which means a LOT more peak consumption.
One plan in development is some kind of communications between the "utilities" (grid-side of the meter) and the charging stations (consumer-side of the meter) to level out the charging peak loads on the transformers.
I agree. It’s not going to happen, but the power grid is totally incapable of handling the increased demand if we all quickly converted from gasoline to electricity and still put on the same number of miles. Smart grid and EVs are closely tied together in the minds of those behind the porkulus - by making it easier to manage demand from existing consumption (and pushing a share of it into off-peak hours), they hope to be able to accomodate a gradual transistion to EVs.
Power is power, and for every watt consumed something more than a watt will be needed to replace it (owing to battery and charger efficiency being less than 100%). There will be no free lunch.