The article is a bit of fear-mongering.
Nothing it says is an outright lie or anything, but it does seem slanted to the gain readership by being shocking.
Many of the quotes are from electric utilities, yet ELECTRIC UTILITIES have been LEADERS in purchasing Hybrid PLUG-IN kits and Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. They love the fuel and maintenance savings.
Electric Forklifts have been around for a long time, and work great. Nobody has fears of forklifts crashing the grid. If anyone really IS worried, it's only because mainstream electric cars are new and different.
My microwave oven uses more electricity (power) than my EV does.
The article says that adding an EV is like adding a small house to the neighborhood. Well, that's true.... kinda.. When my house is at Peak Load - (that is if I am using the microwave, the electric coffee pot, the television, clothes washer, and dishwasher all at once,) I use about 3500 watts. But the rest of the time, I use between 200 and 500 watts. Thats a peak load to base load ratio of somewhere between 17:1 and 7:1.
So, 17 energy efficient houses use the same total power as one energy hungary home.
Obviously, not all homes are the same.
So, don't charge your EV in the middle of the day in summer while everyone's AC is running full blast. Charge it at night, when less electricity is used. Sometimes you can even get cheaper electricity at night. I think that both the Leaf and Volt have a timer feature built into their charger systems. You can plug the car in, and program it to start charging some time later.
The article also had a quote from the utility in Austin. I did some work down there for the University at Austin, which has it's own power utility. Their main concern was always about power for air conditioning. However, guess what all the maintenance vehicles on campus were? Electrics! Piles of Gem cars and similar running around there. (Helps on parking too
Lastly, the article mentions that plugging into "regular" outlets can be a problem as well, as you could accidentally blow a breaker and have power out to other items on the same circuit. REALLY? Oh my, the utter inconvenience..
Any household electric item known to have a large power draw always gets it's own circuit. My microwave oven has it's own outlet, on it's own circuit. It never blows the fuse, and never "knocks out" any other electric items in my house.
An EVer with a 15 amp charger is going to be charging in his garage, or maybe at an outlet on the front porch. Not usually places that you have other large loads going on.
And why didn't the article mention the electrical ADVANTAGES of EVs? I constantly hear talk of "Smart-Grid" technology, where the car's batteries can PROVIDE power to the grid when it needs it. (Granted the round one of commercial EVs don't have this feature, but it's a well-known concept.)
Oh, and now that I think about it. A level 2 charger really is nearly identical in use to an electric water heater or electric clothes dryer. I don't see the utilities worried about people switching to electric appliances, or everyone on one block all happen to run their microwave oven at the same time.
If adding a couple of cars to a neighborhood would wreck the transformers, it was time for new infrastructure already.
Also, people who drive electric cars typically think about their energy use a whole lot more. I don't think I know any EV driver who doesn't use CFL bulbs, timers, power strips, etc to reduce the rest of their electric load.
I think that brings us back to renewable energy. As Tom said, you can make your own electricity. You can't make your own gasoline. Electricity as a fuel (er.. energy carrier, technically..) is amazingly flexible. We can get if from natural gas, coal, wind, solar, nuclear, and a variety of other sources - and for the most part, you get to choose your own source!
Diversification is a good thing. If something goes wrong somewhere ( say, an oil embargo, for example) we still have other options, instead of being held hostage to the costs and politics of one particular fuel.
Also, think how long it took for the Prius to catch on. It took a while. If we DO run into any problems from mass-produced EVs charging, it's not going to hit all at once, the utilities have a while to work out any bugs.
PS: I just read through some of the comments added as public responses to the article. I can NOT believe the lack of knowledge of the public! Wow! Talk about fear-mongering and ignorance!