First: stop muddying the waters by accusing people of shilling for big oil. That's explicitly against the guidelines here. Now for the substance of the reply.

First: stop muddying the waters by accusing people of shilling for big oil. That's explicitly against the guidelines here. Now for the substance of the reply. It's not a fable, it has its own Wikpedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup. The US doesn't consist entirely of the South, and guess what? The South is buying some of that AC power from the North. The Eastern Interconnect is a lovely thing, don't get me wrong, but you can't just handwave off the effect of some 20-40 million 9 to 5ers in the Eastern time zone getting home at the same time and plugging their cars in. It is a solvable problem, most of those cars need to charge for ~90 minutes any time before the morning, but it will be a serious problem if it isn't addressed.