I will acknowledge the above chart is delivery not peak power generation, but to an extent the two are related. If you don't have generation capacity, you can't increase consumption. I wish I had a chart of generation capacity over time, but I couldn't find one. Still though, it still seems to me the change from 1980 to 2000 probably indicates a pretty large change in power capacity, it's not like they managed to deliver a ton more power without making any changes to the grid and production capacity. You really think the only change in our usage in that time period is we left the lights on 60% longer?

I will acknowledge I did only eyeball the chart and saw it was about 2k going to about 4k, the values are 2,290/3801 so about 60% as you say and not doubling. My bad.

Still though, your argument of leaving the lights on longer and power capacity points to how EVs are still possible even with this kind of usage vs power argument. Charging my EV at home doesn't increase my home's peak power much at all. It's another 50A circuit on at my house, but it's not like it's running all the time. It's mostly running when most the other appliances in my house aren't running. So there's already plenty of capacity to serve my house 50A, my neighbor's house 50A, on and on, even with the current hardware because it was already built with the idea a lot of people are going to get home from work and start cooking dinner with an electric range and electric oven together use considerably more power than charging my electric car. For those who can charge at home, it really shouldn't change the math on power at all.

I do agree power demands would increase a good bit with DC fast chargers, those would be the biggest change in our grid infrastructure. Some of the arguments of having a good bit of local battery storage to smooth out those peak power loads sounds incredibly expensive to me. However I don't think those would necessarily make up the bulk of actual charging usage. The majority of Americans live in single family homes, implying they have some kind of garage where they can charge their car and would thus have the same power argument made above. Decent L2 chargers at offices can provide adequate charging to those commuters without charging capacity at home. Obviously this wouldn't have the same time of use shift as above, but L2 charging wouldn't impose nearly as much power demands as DCFC. While DCFC is somewhat important for mass adoption of EVs, I think you might be overestimating the actual usage of DCFC. The majority of Americans would rarely need them. I haven't used one once in the many thousands of miles I've put on my EV so far. A huge chunk of the power charging so far was 12A@120V, would you really argue every home having a load like that running overnight is going to melt all the transformers?

And FWIW I'm still a proponent for using diesel/petrol where it makes sense. Please don't take me as an EV fanatic thinking that Elon's self driving pure EV semi's are going to completely change the trucking industry anytime soon.