Depends where you are. Here, our provincial electricity system operator sometimes pays other jurisdictions to take our power as our base production can exceed demand.... Having a few 100k electric cars plugged during those moments would make electricity cheaper for everyone in Ontario.
Unfortunately it wouldn't, it would just mean we are at least consuming those kWh rather than dumping them on the US market. While it's true that we've had periods in the low demand spring/fall where the market price has gone negative, it's not frequent (not a regular occurrence). What happens is that wind generation produces surpluses during periods of low demand and because that capacity is all contracted at a fixed rate and there's a clause for compensation for curtailment, no matter what we do with that power, it basically costs us the same or close to the same. The "best" scenario there is that we re-sell that power (export it) but the volume of power, and the nature of when it is produced, has tanked the market price (average is around $0.015/kWh) so we recoup very little of our actual cost.
If wind wasn't paid for curtailment, that would save us tremendous money, as we wouldn't have to worry about what to do with the power, we'd just reject it if we didn't need it, but that's not how the contracts were structured unfortunately.
Overall, more consumption would have the potential to slightly reduce rates (we'd spill less hydro, which is wickedly cheap) and we'd have more kWh over which to spread the fixed costs, but our surplus wind generation (I know it gets called surplus baseload, but wind really isn't baseload, despite being labelled as such, because of its production profile) is a big liability and we are really only going to start seeing costs decline once the contracts start expiring for both it, and solar, which is even more subsidized, but has much lower installed capacity and produces far fewer kWh.
Also our electricity consumption is subsidized by our provincial government with lower prices, so it makes sense as a tax payer to change your vehicle fuel from highly taxed fossil fuel to government subsidized electricity.
Yes, agreed. And it doesn't look like that subsidy will be removed anytime soon. I expect we'll be waiting for the contracts to expire and then it will be phased-out.
For us we would need 1 gas/electric hybrid with todays technology for range and charging rates of pure electric vehicles. Our other vehicle could be a relatively short range electric, with 200km real range in the winter. We have 200amp service at our house but probably only use 60 max with only the electric dryer being a large load, so charging 2 cars simultaneously shouldn't be an issue at 40 amps each.
Yes, we could get by with one full EV here too. We already have an electric car charger plug in the driveway.