I'm definitely not one to argue the full migration to electrics. As mentioned elsewhere I think diesel/petrol/similar kind of fuel vehicles will be around in at least some capacity for quite some time. Its incredibly energy dense and the ability to just pump up gallons of it from pits in the ground is quite handy.
> Some would be hybrid: plug in at home every night and top-off with fast chargers during the week as needed.
I really can't imagine this would make up any large fraction of the EV fleet. If someone can charge from home, the extreme majority of their charging will be overnight or potentially during a weekend if they need to do some catch up. The vast majority of commute cars which can charge at home will not need this hybrid approach save for the extremely rare long road trip when comparing the total number of miles.
> percentage of the population would only drive 20 miles a day and would be happy slow charging over eight hours
That 20mi commute would generally use ~6kWh. Over 8 hours, that's 750W of power. During a time where power at people's homes is often at its lowest point. Delivering that power would barely be a blip. If our grid collapses because a few million people plug in a tiny 750W space heater overnight we've got some serious problems.
> If you feel you still need to argue against my claim that we need to double power generation and infrastructure, you need to argue against Elon Musk
I would, especially when it comes to long-haul trucks. Arguing against Elon is then easy in this regard, where's the long-haul driverless trucks which were going to revolutionize the entire trucking industry in 2017? EVs in this kind of capacity don't make sense without massive changes not only to the grid but also to our battery technology. Just making the batteries a little fatter isn't going to change the math on these kinds kinds of trucks. So you should pretty much just completely eliminate these kinds of vehicles from your model, its a moonshot to even think these kinds of things are really going to switch to EV-only anytime soon for many reasons.
I don't doubt we'll need to make a lot of changes to our grid. I agree it will take a lot of energy to make those changes and it will use a lot of petroleum based products to make those changes. There's oil in practically everything we touch, so I agree its short sighted to praise the idea of expensive oil. I also agree this won't be something that happens overnight, it'll be something that will take an effort over decades.
I agree moving to EVs is overly praised and there's quite a cult mindset of if we just put an EV in every garage we'll have solved some big problem. As you mentioned its often a question of power, and well at least down here in Texas overnight we often get to the point where there's not even enough load to match the generation available for free. On many grids there's already a good bit of slack in the power distribution in off-peak times, probably enough to support every average commuter car in every single family household. Note that term, average commuter car. Not the people which somehow are still sane after a 100+mi daily commute, they're extreme outliers and yeah it will probably take a lot of work to get to the point where all of those people are reasonably served with EVs.
I think there's a bit of a disconnect between us here. You're arguing about the full migration to EVs, while I mostly agree a full migration to EVs isn't really practical anytime soon. While a large part of the average commuter car and short haul vans can probably make the switch to EVs today, it seems there are plenty of use cases where EVs are still impractical vehicles. This is before even figuring in your grid arguments. So once you then eliminate those vehicles where EVs are currently a somewhat impractical case at the moment, the math of how reasonable grid upgrades get becomes a much more practical number.
Also, FWIW I do agree there will need to be some amount of an upgrade to the grid, and it will probably be a large one. Shifting all that energy which used to be handled by fluids running through pipes into cables overhead will inherently mean some amount of capacity upgrades. However, I think for average commuter cars, this really won't be that much of an impact. There are definitely cases where there will need to be a large change (DCFC corridors) but I doubt the average suburb would need some radical change. Its just adding load to a time of day that routinely experienced its lull.