that was also my thought. I don’t actually know the cause of the brown-out\black-out situation in California, but adding EVs en masse to that geography is going to crush the grid, unless new power generation facilities are brought online FIRST. And now that I am thinking about it, its not really necessarily about generation, but about storage. If the generators are going 100% one hundred percent of the time, then they need battery\capacitor banks to store the energy so that it can be used during peak cycles. There will always be peaks and valleys to utilization as long as humans are diurnal, so plan for the valleys in utilization by having battery arrays to capture. What do i know. Maybe they already do this.
Yes and no. Don't get me wrong. I'm of the opinion much as you are that pushing everyone into EV's is a major concern with the demand of a grid that's already failing in 3rd world countries like California. I'm saying the peak time thing might not be correct.
The reason for that is there's usually no reason the EV has to be charged every day. I'm thinking of getting an EV largely because I have a large solar system on my house. One of my concerns is that the battery storage I already bought and installed was intended to power my home through the night on most nights (not all nights, that'd be infeasible), not more than that. Thus, charging the EV when I come home about the time the sun goes down would drain my home batteries more than I originally intended (what you seem to describe, though you're talking about it from the grid utility company).
Then I thought about it further. I usually drive 200 miles per week, about 35 mile round trip on work days and a little here and there the rest of the week for various errands, sometimes in the evenings and sometimes on the weekends. If my EV gets 250 to 300 miles on a full charge, that means I wouldn't have to charge it every day. If I fully charge it on the weekend (off peak hours if you don't have solar on your home) I could pick a day in the middle of the week to charge it again to give me a little wiggle room to not be near empty on Friday.
Combine that with a feature my solar inverter has: the option to power a separate electrical panel only when I have excess power, say when my home batteries are 80% charged or more (enough to power my house through the night without pulling power from the grid). Then any charge above that 80% is excess power I can use to do things like charge the EV. If I come home with my EV and have, say at least "half a tank" charge, I can charge it with the intermittent powered outlet (meaning it won't add to my power bill, but would be charged only for a little while that evening until my home batteries discharge down to 80% charged). If I come home with less than half a tank I can charge it with the constant powered outlet (knowing some or all would come from the grid). By doing that regularly, I believe I could power my EV about 50% of the time with nothing but excess power that doesn't result in me pulling power from the grid (will increase my power bill only half as much as someone else charging his EV).
Of course, that's ME handling MY power to fit MY needs, not the situation of the grid utility powering everybody's EV's. But they could do something similar. They could have two lines coming to your house: one that's powered constantly and one that's powered intermittently. And they could charge a lower rate for the intermittent power (it'd be powered only when the sun is shining bright and/or the utility's battery storage or hydrogen storage is high).
Don't get me wrong. I hate the Dims pushing everybody into EV's and trying make all square pegs fit into round holes. I'm just wanting people on our side to argue the facts correctly. IMHO, the peak time issue is easily worked around in a mostly workable solution.