The US added basically 0% extra transmission capacity last year.
... Now your local charging station will require a nuclear plant to keep up with ~1MW per car.
The fast chargers that achieve charging in a few minutes, and which are indeed able to provide up to 1 MW of charging power, have their own internal batteries, so they take from the electrical grid a power averaged over a long time, not the peak power that they provide to the charged vehicle.
Why? Where do those extra cars come from? In reality the change you're going to see is from spending 30 minutes to charge 1 car followed by 30 minutes of sitting idle to spending 5 minutes to charge 1 car followed by 55 minutes of sitting idle.
Or, alternatively, go from 6 stations each spending 30 minutes / car to charge 12 cars per hour to 1 station spending 5 minutes / car to charge 12 cars per hour.
The electricity demand only depends on the number of miles driven. Same with ICE cars: the speed through which fuel comes out of the gas station's nozzle doesn't impact how much fuel you consume during your commute, or how often the gas station needs to be resupplied.
The reality of the situation is that most people who buy an EV will use fast charging only a few times a year. The majority will be charging overnight to recuperate their daily use, which amounts to drawing <1% of a MW. The grid, in it's current form, is totally capable of this.
What would be a strain though is large ultra fast charging stations along major travel corridors. But I'd still wager that those will be overkill for most.
Charging was what stopped me from getting an EV when I was a renter. In a world where I can recharge in 7 to 10 minutes, it becomes a lot more feasible for a renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities. A renter can just pull up to a recharging station. Wait 7 to 10 minutes or (maybe 5 if they don't mind a half charge) and be off.
Assuming that your car is parked for 18 hours of the day or more (and if it is not, you're a courier, taxi driver or similar) the question is not "do I own or rent the place where I live?" it is "How do I get electricity to where the car is normally parked?"
If you solve that with a L2 charger - at night or during the day, you're good. Then recharge time becomes irrelevant as you don't stand there waiting for it, and it happens as part of daily routine. You don't have to regularly pay attention to "When do I have to go get fuel?", it's just done daily.
Electricity is found nearly everywhere, you do not have to treat it as something found only at a special fuelling station. EVS are unlike gas cars in that respect.
Which sucks, but the majority of people (2/3) don't rent.
I think this is unavoidable for any sort of decent charging station from now on, anyway but does require significant investment in infrastructure.
BYD was the first company demonstrating such batteries and chargers, but CATL followed after a short time. While the times reported by CATL are slightly longer than for BYD at room temperature, these CATL batteries have faster charging at low temperatures.
It is nice to see healthy competition between the major Chinese battery producers. Unfortunately, there is much less competition for them from other countries.
The electrical grid infrastructure that is needed does not depend on the charging speed, but it is determined by the number of cars that are charged per day at a given location (and their average battery capacity).
