Speaking as someone who's worked in renewables and utilities, I can tell you that the exact opposite is true. Having a reliable load at night would flatten out

Speaking as someone who's worked in renewables and utilities, I can tell you that the exact opposite is true. Having a reliable load at night would flatten out the demand curve for electricity, making the grid significantly easier and cheaper to manage. Those utility poles and power lines you worry about are there to handle peak load, which won't be impacted at all by EVs, which will charge predominantly at night. A solid mix of renewables -- hydro or geo for base load, with solar for peak load and wind to top off intermittent and nighttime demand -- is most efficient when the demand is relatively stable. No more need to shunt perfectly good electricity into the ground just because it's night. And boy oh boy does it make the grid economics of distributed solar better. If most of your home's solar production capacity is being soaked up by your car, the grid and utility doesn't need to support big buy/sell cycles on sunny days. Electric cars would stabilize pricing and are probably the only way SmartGrid can realistically work. Unlike refrigerator compressors or clothes dryers, electric cars have a smooth rate of draw and, as small industries pop up to parasitize the big battery in your EV, we'll increasingly see EVs as a home's store of electricity. This will be good for the system in the same way that per-home cisterns dramatically reduce demand on the water systems here in Southern Europe.