OT: If all cars were electric ...??

Electricity generation has been trundling along at about 85 TWh per quarter in recent years.

Average power if distributed evenly over 24 hours all year long = 11GW So three Hinkley Point C's worth

If everyone wants to do it overnight make the peak at least double that, more like triple?

This time of year, f*ck all

Or from your figures above, 11 million kW continuous for 32 million cars, so 350 watts continuous per car. Or about 1 kW for 8 hours. No doubt Harry will be along soon to tell us how much his panels are providing at the moment.

Did this in another place recently and came up with 16 GW.

Closer to triple assuming an 8 hour overnight charge cycle.

Summats not right there a EV battery is more like 40 kWHrs not 8... Home chargers are rated at about 7 kW.

There's barely 9 hours dawn to dusk up here now and that's "daylight" almost certainly not enough light to generate 1 kW for a significant amount of that period. Mid winter daylight is down to 7 hours.

Only 8 k? That must be getting close to being uneconomic to have a car at all, unless its a little cheap as chips bean can on wheels...

Fairy nuff. There's plenty of scope for reasonable assumptions, I'm not convinced that 8 kmiles/year is particularly reasonable. I do about 15 kmiles/year.

As it's dark, zero.

I run my car about 75% off solar power. More in Summer, less in Winter. But that's only possible because I'm retired.(And I have solar panels) I can pick and choose when I travel and when to charge the battery. There's no way every new car can be electric by 2040. We don't have the infrastructure.

In the immediate future, charging cars will be done at night by most people. But that spare capacity will soon be used up. Maybe we could have solar panels on workplace buildings but that wouldn't help on dull/short days.

I think the age of mass motoring will end in the next decade. The electric train will take the strain.

That isn't what 'they' plan anyway, just no more pure fossil fuel cars by 2040, some will go electric, others hybrid, I'll accept a petrol PHEV by then I expect.

Or hydrogen powered

Now add in the trucks

so cheap electricity during the night will probably disappear.

That wasn't the question, but 100,000 British HGVs, 70,000+ miles each, if diesels get 4-5mpg then electric might take 2-3kWh/mile) another 21 TWh per year?

How much of their 44 tonnes would be taken by batteries? Do they have enough idle hours per day to re-charge, or would they need swappable batteries?

Plus coaches and buses ...

Well many cars on lease have the batteries removed after a certain degradation and then they are flogged on to electricity storage companies for use in their farms. Then of course getting shot of them when uneconomic is somebody else's problem. As for peak don't, I guess it depends on when and where they get charged/topped up, I passed a police car on charge today, so obviously no criminals are allowed to commit crimes when plods electric car battery is flat. Brian

The title of this thread sounds like an amalgam of two old Gary Numan tunes. Brian

Misread the spreadsheet, make it 500,000 HGVs, so another 100TWh.

Hydrogen power is another fraud.

I imagine the overall efficiency, from initial electricity generation, through hydrogen generation, through fuel cell combustion, to power is appalling, even if the initial stage in that sequence is absorbing e.g. surplus wind power.

And what about all the industrial uses of coal and gas. No more gas central heating for you my lad!

UK consumption of fossils fuel equates roughly to 300GW continuous. IIRC.

A lot can be done using nuclear electricity, but you still need some gas/oil/coal for e.g. making ammonia=>fertiliser

"Because of its many uses, ammonia is one of the most highly produced inorganic chemicals. Dozens of chemical plants worldwide produce ammonia. Consuming more than 1% of all man-made power, ammonia production is a significant component of the world energy budget. The USGS reports global ammonia production in 2014 was 176 million tonnes.China accounted for 32.6% of that (increasingly from coal as part of urea synthesis), followed by Russia at 8.1%, India at 7.6%, and the United States at 6.4%. About 88% of the ammonia produced was used for fertilizing agricultural crops. As of 2012 the global production of ammonia produced from natural gas using the steam reforming process was

Maybe surplus nuclear power could synthesise it from air and water. I don?t know

Not when produced by nukes.

I do 4k (well, my wife and I do that between us). The 8k figure comes from the RAC link I included in my previous post.

The car is a 12 year old Volvo with a about 60k miles on the clock. I'm hoping to run it another 10 years, until it gets up to 100k. :)

I'll happily trade up to a new car once I can get one with reasonable self-driving capability, and I think 10 years might just about do it.

True. The difficulties and dangers of transporting, storage, manufacture and use preclude it.