There is a risk of a tragedy of the commons situation with EV charging and other wider use of electricity for heat and as a primary source of energy -- there wi

There is a risk of a tragedy of the commons situation with EV charging and other wider use of electricity for heat and as a primary source of energy -- there will, in the short and medium term, need to either be massive investment in significantly increasing grid capacity, or greater control of loads being connected to the grid. Putting more copper in the ground can help remove local constraints on how much energy can flow into a given area at a time, and ensure everyone in the street can put their car onto charge at 6:30pm. But the rest of the grid needs to be adjusted in response - generation will need to be greater for these swings in demand, and this might not align with when renewable energy is abundant. For large loads like EV chargers (or really anything else beyond basic domestic usage), there's likely to be significant correlation in usage (charging cars arriving home from work, or upon arrival at the office, turning on heating during a cold snap an hour before arriving home, etc.) over time, that the energy networks can't deliver. Large loads will therefore likely need to be remotely switchable and controlled by a grid controller, taking into consideration local load (to avoid melting the cable in your street and taking everyone offline) and wider regional and national load (if solar production in your region has dropped due to a large storm front passing over, there's less energy to go around). Switchable loads need to be secure, otherwise an attacker who can remotely switch them can do harm to the wider energy network, especially if the vulnerable device is widely deployed and can be trivially controlled. For example, even simply turning off a large number of active loads simultaneously could destabilise the grid and lead to an outage. Done at scale due to vulnerable devices, this could cause widespread problems. There's a bigger discussion to be had around people's expectations to charge their car instantly at full rate - perhaps differentiated pricing incentives will incentivise users to plug their vehicle in and let it charge at the best price it can find overnight, rather than immediately charging, to spread loads. But measures like this require a secure set of basic infrastructure to control large load devices, otherwise everyone will insist on bringing theirs online immediately, resulting in an outage and everybody being disconnected due to a breaker tripping or a wire melting.