Can the grid handle EVs?

At 100% EV fleet, off-peak

Extra annual energy - -

Peak added MW - -

New total peak - -

NEM demand + EV load by hour

Grey line: representative 2024 NEM operational demand. Coloured fill: EV load at your settings, added on top of the demand curve. The combined line is the dashed curve.

Fleet scenario

Penetration is the share of the AU light-vehicle fleet already on electrons. 100% is the long-run ceiling, not a 2030 target.

Fleet penetration 100% Fleet: 15 million light vehicles (ABS 2024). Today the EV share is about 2%.

Kilometres per year ABS Survey of Motor Vehicle Use average. Same default as the cost-per-km page. EV consumption (kWh/100km) Real-world AU figure. Smaller EVs are 14-16; large SUVs 20-24.

Charging pattern

The same annual kWh, redistributed across the day. The chart shows why "can the grid handle it" is really "when does everyone plug in".

Annual energy, in perspective

Stacked bar of today's NEM annual demand against the extra EV load at a few penetration levels. Full passenger fleet on electrons is an extra 20% on top of current demand, delivered over the whole year - dwarfed by rooftop solar deployment over the same period (AEMO ISP step-change adds about 45 GW of new renewable capacity by 2050).

Methodology

Daily shape. The grey curve is a rounded representative NEM operational-demand weekday in 2024: trough ~17.5 GW at 04:00, evening peak ~27.5 GW at 18:00. Not any particular day; the shape is what matters for this question. Operational demand already accounts for rooftop solar (it is demand net of DER generation), which is why the midday figure sits well below the evening peak even on a working day.
EV load. Annual kWh = fleet * penetration * km/yr * kWh/100km / 100. That figure is divided by 365 to get an average daily kWh, then distributed across the 24 hours according to the selected pattern. Every pattern sums to 1.0, so the total energy is invariant; only the hourly MW changes.
Patterns. Naive, off-peak, and solar-soak are stylised - not measured smart-charging traces. They illustrate the envelope. Real fleets land between off-peak and naive today; workplace charging and managed-tariff programs nudge toward solar-soak.
Distribution vs generation. This page is about bulk generation and the wholesale curve. The harder engineering problem - whether your street transformer can take four neighbours all plugging in at 18:00 - is a distribution-side question that does not show up in NEM totals. It is tractable and already being worked on by DNSPs under the ARENA DEIP program.
What the chart does not model. Heavy vehicles, rail electrification, embedded-network hot days, or bidirectional flows (V2G). Adding those would shift the numbers, not the conclusion.