Electric Car Recharges May Strain Grid

Scientific American:

So would car owners all plug in at similar times? Early statistics from a concentration of electric car owners in Texas say, yes, they would.
The data come from a new, 280-hectare neighborhood in Austin, Tex., known as Mueller. The community is designed to maximize sustainable living, exploiting green building construction, intelligent appliances, smart electric meters and home management systems, as well as integrated residential, work, shopping and entertainment spaces. When complete, it is supposed to offer homes for 13,000 residents and jobs for about as many individuals.
Although energy planners for Mueller and many places worldwide had made assumptions about when and where electric car owners would charge their vehicles, real-world studies of actual consumer behavior were lacking. So Pecan Street, Inc., a research consortium based at the University of Texas at Austin, heavily instrumented homes throughout Mueller to take data every 15 seconds that would show what is really happening. The consumers have not been encouraged to use their cars in any particular way, and electricity rates do not change with the time of day, so costs do not influence their decisions.
Brewster McCracken, executive director of Pecan Street, and Chris Holcomb, data scientist at the organization, have just analyzed the first set of data, taken from 10 households over two months. "What we assumed turned out to be true," Holcomb says. "People come home at the end of a day and turn everything on." That means the television, computer, air conditioning, other appliances—along with plugging in their electric car for a recharge. The pattern held up across the two months—even on weekends, when it might be easy to plug in during the morning hours, and even though dozens of charging stations have been installed at convenient locations in and around Mueller.

Couldn't utilities set up deals like the hot water heater controls where they remotely control when things in your house are using power.  I would think that they could spread out the charging of the cars overnight rather easily with modern computer technology.  We ought to be moving that way on a lot of things, like when clothes are washed and dried, or when air conditioners run the hardest.  You know, cool the house down at night and let it warm back up some during the day. But, damn it, that might take a little new equipment or something.