It's curious that the current tide of public opinion reckons that we're all going to be in EVs in 10-15 years, when the grid nearly collapses under the weight of everybody plugging in a heater and turning on Netflix at the same time.
A TV pulls what, 50-100 watts? A space heater pulls 1500W on high. Now think about many people who, for better or worse, are running multiple space heaters in their house. Now imagine millions of households doing that, on two days' notice.
The problem is that many seem to believe the second part will happen automatically, whereas in reality, it'll require large investments in renewing and improving current infrastructure.
As a comparison, I live in the Finnish countryside. Cold like the one experienced in Texas is pretty normal here, but the grid situation is similar to what the grandparent suggests; a large-scale EV rollout would simply not be possible during wintertime as the grid's already maxed out due to electric heating. And this is when most people burn wood or wood pellets in order to keep their electricity bills low.
This will be easier to remedy in urban areas, but unless we start upgrading the infrastructure soon, there's simply no way we'll be using EV's to the extent we want to in 15 years.
Worst case scenario there are some brown outs as they get their shit together. But it’s relatively easy to solve this with pricing or by subsidizing local solar or a lot of other things. And people will absolutely not tolerate their power going out, so those things will happen.
Granted, seems like if you're driving ~40-60 miles a day, then you're looking at needing 4kW during the evenings. Not insignificant, but it's like... electric heating for one big room, basically.
A higher overall demand makes the grid healthier, not weaker.
I'd say 20 of those would certainly do the trick, and then some. Might be able to get by with 10 or so.
They would save rate payers a bucket of money as well; the largest grid scale battery ever built that you mention is projected to offer cost savings of $100 million over its 20 year lifespan versus the alternatives; not bad at all.
As far as the up front cost, it's pocket change for a state like Texas, and they could use it in the summer as well.
i absolutely agree that not buying these batteries is just plain stupid, therefore the chance of them not getting bought is significant.