But I don't know what you mean by "synthetic" since charging an EV is very much a real load, which is exactly why utilities should be the biggest fans of EV's. It's a no-brainer... "hey utilities, you know how demand for your product has been stagnant or falling? Well here's a product that can steal gasoline's market share, makes up about a third of your consumers' consumption, AND is cheaper to operate for your consumers."
Utilities should be the biggest champions of EV's.
In the last 30 years the regulations around water consumption have driven rapid development in dish and clothes washer technology which has also improved their electrical efficiency.
The efficiencies we see today in desktop and server CPUs were less intentional and more a bi-product of the performance goals. Modern Intel CPUs have their origins in the Centrino mobile platform of the early 2000s, a variant of the P3. The Netburst CPUs of the time eschewed efficiency for speed and so P4 chips were very hot and inefficient, when Intel hit a ceiling with TDP and clockspeeds they had to reevaluate the situation. With Centrino, Intel's mobile CPU, they were trying to make the most power efficient CPU they could and concluded that the faster the CPU could complete it's workload and power down, the more battery could be saved. The end result was a very powerful and power efficient CPU. Intel found that with a few tweaks Centrino could outperform Netburst at a lower clockspeed and with far less power consumption.
Nationally, every hour people are using their phones, instead of watching TV, playing a gaming console, or using a traditional computer, is a big savings.
Now I have an LCD TV that uses well under half the power of a CRT, LED bulbs which use about 5% the power of incandescents, and an A-rated washing machine that uses about a half the power of the old-fashioned ones. At work I use a computer with an LED-backlit LCD monitor and a modern processor that idles at practically nothing.
For most people who had "all mod cons" 20 years ago, they're using less electricity today than they were then.
Electric cars are the one wrinkle, and I think they will drive electricity usage upwards. Other than that, though, domestic use is declining for the middle class, and commercial and industrial use are too in many cases. An awful lot of electricity usage 20 years ago was essentially waste, and we're getting quite good at eliminating that.