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Even if we were using substantially less energy overall, transitioning away from fossil fuels for heating and transportation is likely to result in using a lot
by elihu 4y ago
Even if we were using substantially less energy overall, transitioning away from fossil fuels for heating and transportation is likely to result in using a lot more electricity.
I expect most modern countries are going to need to be constantly upgrading their power grids and power generation capabilities over the next few decades. Hopefully most of the new energy generation will be renewables.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoEV's mostly charge at night when demand is low, so they should have an undersized impact. We'll need more generation, but only about half as much more as a naive analysis would indicate.
- thefoyer 4y agoWhere do you think the electricity comes from?
- el_don_almighty 4y agoThe same place hamburger, bacon, and keebler cookies. elves
- elihu 4y agoIt depends. Fossil fuels are still a major source, which needs to be replaced as soon as possible with something else (where "something else" probably means some combination of solar, wind, and nuclear). What I'm saying is that in our long term planning, we shouldn't be thinking "we have X terawatts of fossil fuel production capacity so we need to build out X terawatts of non-fossil-fuel production capacity to replace it (including storage, as needed)" We should be thinking "We probably need ~2X terawatts of additional production because we're replacing fossil fuels for electricity generation in addition to transitioning to electricity-based heating and transportation."