This sparks an interesting discussion around 'what if we all had EVs'. Texas would not be the only place struggling to meet demand. If everyone is fueling their cars with electricity, demand is going to be high in all cities.
Without fossil fuels we need to find new sources for power. It's not good enough to say 'electricity', how do you generate it at a capacity that fills in for the 20.5 million barrels of oil consumed a day in the USA?
The numbers are interesting. There is 17500 kw/h or 1.7 mw/h in a barrel of oil. Using 20.5m barrels a day, that's 34.85 million mw/h a day. The US currently generates around 10 million mw/h of electricity a day[1].
Granted, a fraction of a barrel of oil is used for gasoline, but you can see that the grid will need a sizeable upgrade if it is to fill in for our dependency on oil.
EVs don't need to be charged at peak usage times. We have ours scheduled to charge starting at 11pm every day (which is just before the lowest demand part of the day in my area), and most EVs include this functionality.
And as EVs become more common, I could absolutely see them being a useful tool in power generation. I'd absolutely allow the power company to control the home-charging of my car for a discount (and some agreement that i'd be able to charge to full at least once a day). The power company could enable more EVs to charge when there is a valley in demand, and turn some off when there are spikes. And all of that can happen without vehicle-to-grid systems which come with their own bag of tradeoffs.
Also, keep in mind that gas engines aren't 100% efficient (IIRC they are under 50% efficient). So even though there is theoretically 1.7 mw/h of power in a barrel of oil (I'm taking your number as true here), I assume that cars are only using a fraction of that (especially after all the refinement as well, which I'm assuming cuts into that efficiency even more).
The biggest factor is how much of the EV charging can be done at algorithmically controlled times.
If the load can be computer controlled to exactly fit the supply curve, the electricity becomes extremely cheap to provide.
If that same load can basically instantly switch from charging, to paused, to discharging we end up with an extremely smart and efficient grid that can very effectively utilize high variance generation sources.
Without fossil fuels we need to find new sources for power. It's not good enough to say 'electricity', how do you generate it at a capacity that fills in for the 20.5 million barrels of oil consumed a day in the USA?
The numbers are interesting. There is 17500 kw/h or 1.7 mw/h in a barrel of oil. Using 20.5m barrels a day, that's 34.85 million mw/h a day. The US currently generates around 10 million mw/h of electricity a day[1].
Granted, a fraction of a barrel of oil is used for gasoline, but you can see that the grid will need a sizeable upgrade if it is to fill in for our dependency on oil.
Please forgive me if I have some of this wrong!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...