I don't think widespread EV adoption will happen very quickly in the U.S. outside of California.

That said, this discussion among European EV professionals made me realize both why utilities need to start planning for it and why doing so is such a challenge.

The discussion was convened by Delta-EE, a European consulting firm that focuses on emerging distributed energy markets. The other participants were from Octopus Electric Vehicles, a British company that helps its customers buy or lease EVs and get the best chargers and power plans for them; New Motion, a Dutch EV charging network owner that was bought by Royal Dutch Shell in 2017; and French distribution grid operator Enedis.

The transcript of the discussion is a worthwhile read for everyone from people who know nothing about EVs but are interested in their potential impact to utility executives charged with helping their companies figure out what that impact will be.

Early on in the discussion, John Murray, a principal analyst with Delta-EE, said something that made me realize why utilities need to start planning for large EV adoption even if it isn't coming anytime soon.

Murray says there are only 1.5 million EVs — or significantly less than 1 percent of all vehicles — on European roads. Even so, he says, Delta-EE's research shows there are more than 500,000 chargers in what he calls the top five European markets — the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway.

"If they were all turned on at the same time, at full power," he says, "then total consumption from those devices would exceed 7.5 gigawatts, which is around 15 percent of the U.K.’s peak electricity demand. So, even at this stage, you can start to see how the impact could start to swell."

The discussion very quickly moves beyond that to how EVs are likely to impact the grid, what technologies utilities and others will have to use to accomodate them and even how they will impact business models — could EV manufacturers wind up also providing chargers and power plans, as Octopus Electric Vehicles does?

As I said earlier, it's a worthwhile read — also a fun and thought-provoking one.