[alancalverd (OP)]

Attracted by the latest Tesla X in a showroom, I wondered what would happen if the idea caught on and everyone  used electric transport? So I did some calculations...

There are about 30,000,000 cars in the UK. Average use is say 2 hours per day, so divide by 12 and multiply by, say, 20 kilowatts per car, and we are using about 50 GW  of power for personal transport.

There are about 5,000,000 trucks, vans and buses. Average use say 10 hours per day at 50 kW means we are using a bit over 100 GW  for shifting goods and passengers.

So in order to keep moving, we need to supply 150 GW of electricity (assuming 100% battery efficiency).

The present generating capacity available to the national grid is 55 GW, of which 70% is already committed in winter.

"Who Killed the Electric Car"  is an excellent DVD which points the finger of conspiracy at the oil industry,  General Motors, and the vehicle component manufacturers and service organisations for suppressing the very successful GM "EV", but I think there may be an even bigger elephant in the room - the sheer impossibility of generating enough electricity (from what?)  and distributing it, if the idea of electric road transport really catches on..

[jeffreyH]

That is the sensible view. However conspiracy "theorists" are not sensible.

[timey]

This for some reason reminded me of a documentary that I saw recently about the search for signals from outer-space that might be identified with intelligent extra terrestrial life.  The thinking (which explored several directions) was oriented towards the assumption that any extra terrestrial civilization of an advanced nature might be detectable via it's energy footprint.  The thinking didn't explore the possibility that an extra terrestrial civilization of an advanced nature might not actually have an energy footprint in the terms that we recognize.

We use a lot more energy than is necessary.  I don't mean that we should turn off our lights, or go to bed early.  What I mean is that the designs of our houses are inadequate and require unnecessary energy consumption in order to make them habitable.  This is inexplicable in terms of logic because in terms of architecture the designs for energy self sufficient housing have existed throughout the ages of history, and have been vastly improved upon by innovative architectures of the modern era.  By means of employing these housing designs it is possible to use the suns energy in many different examples of basic physics to heat, cool, collect water, provide optimum natural daytime lighting, 'and' produce regular electricity energy.

This, of course, raises the question as to why aren't we all living in energy and water self sufficient housing?  I hear it may have a lot to do with getting insurance, planning permission, and clearly the energy providers would be a tad dismayed if everyone were to go off the grid.
Let's not go there aye!  ...But to say so if we living in energy and water self sufficient housing, it would leave a lot more electricity free to be used for the electric transport notion.

If there were an advanced extra terrestrial civilization out there somewhere, do you think they might have advanced to the degree of existing within a vastly reduced energy footprint?  ...And what advancements would our human civilization have to incorporate in order to catch up?   

[alancalverd (OP)]

On the transport scene, I can see a two-class society developing. "Early adopters" can get subsidised travel in some very exciting cars, but as soon as we have a million pure-electric cars on the road the subsidies will stop because the infrastructure can't keep up. Electric trucks and buses similarly will be adopted by cities and corporations that are big enough to have an independent infrastructure (probably gas powered) but private taxi owners and small hauliers won't be able to compete: you can't make money from a truck that has to queue up to refuel for an hour every 100 miles or a taxi that you need to recharge overnight (most "black cabs" are shared by two or three drivers and single "limo" owner-drivers have to offer 24/7 booking for airport runs).

On the domestic scene, there are plenty of passive houses in much colder places than Britain, but whilst they manage adequate temperature control, "convenience" power for cooking and running household machinery can be very flaky without a grid. The joy of gas and mains electricity is the immediate and unlimited availability of several kilowatts: cooking with  an Aga is fun and different, but if you had to light a stove any time you wanted to drill a hole or mow the lawn, you'd soon lose interest, so you need a huge investment in batteries and inverters which will only be used for a few minutes each day: a national grid provides both convenience and resilience, as long as it is reasonably matched to average demand, and is a far more efficient use of capital.   

[evan_au]

multiply by, say, 20 kilowatts per car

Electric vehicles save energy in at least 3 ways:
- They might use 20kW or more while accelerating, but they pump much of that energy back into the battery/supercapacitor as they decelerate (minus any losses to friction and electrical resistance, of course). As yet, putting petrol back in the tank when you decelerate is still a pipe dream - and will probably remain so, since heat engines are severely punished by the laws of thermodynamics.
- They are generally much lighter than petrol cars. The electric motor is much lighter than a petrol engine, since it doesn't need to contain thousands of chemical explosions every minute. And to get the desired range, they aim to make the entire vehicle as light as possible.
- When an electric car is stationary, they don't need to keep a large mass of metal hot, so the engine just stops.
- To improve range, they are generally more aerodynamic than your average petrol car.

So the average energy consumption is much lower than you may expect from the peak power.

Hybrid vehicles can deliver some of these benefits, as a small fossil engine overcomes the average frictional losses, with the more powerful and efficient electric drive system catering for the acceleration/deceleration peaks.

we need to supply 150 GW of electricity

This assumes that an electric vehicle is purely an energy sink.
In fact, one of the main benefits may be as a vehicle for energy storage and reuse.

One of the major problems of renewable electricity sources (such as solar, wind and tide) is that they only operate at certain hours, and not necessarily the hours that you would like. If parked electric vehicles were tied into the electric grid, they could soak up this non-storable energy (or save the base load coal and nuclear power stations from the very expensive shutdown procedure during the low-consumption hours every night). They could deliver some of the electricity back to the grid during peak electricity consumption periods. They can also help with grid stabilization.
 

Average use is say 2 hours per day

I think this is the biggest problem of today's consumer car industry. There are massive spikes of simultaneous usage (during which the roads become painfully slow), and long periods sitting unused. If this was some sort of economic calculation, you would have to say that it is an incredible waste of money.

To some extent this can be addressed by data processing and computation, as shown by:
- Car hiring services, like traditional taxis and modern challengers like Uber
- Car sharing services, where a phone app locates the nearest idle car, you walk to it, and it lets you drive it away.
- Rapidly developing technology around autonomous vehicles. In a few years, this will allow car sharing services where the car comes to you.

Naturally, all this will require a social revolution:
- Some people can telecommute, which reduces the need for a personal vehicle. But telecommuting makes some bosses, workers and customers uncomfortable.
- It will be easier in countries with better public transport; public transport is far more energy-efficient than single-passenger vehicles. In Shanghai, I saw electric buses that recharged from overhead wires whenever they stopped for passengers.
- For many today, a car is a trophy, a sign of conspicuous consumption that will not be readily relinquished
- Many parts of the USA are structured around this philosophy of a vehicle per person.
- It seems that for some young men, it is a sign of their manhood, a sort of mobile lek (not the Albanian sort).

I agree that our current energy consumption is horribly inefficient; if we use electric vehicles in the same way we use fossil vehicles, they will be horribly inefficient too. But I can see how electric vehicles could be an improvement.

Now, if only we had some more economical battery/supercapacitor technology...

[alancalverd (OP)]

Alas, "proper" all-electric cars such as the Teslas, BMWs, etc, weigh in around 2 tonnes and are no more aerodynamically efficient than their fossil fuelled equivalents, so 20 kW is about right for average power consumption. The 100 kWh Tesla X has a range of about 300 miles, so at 60 mph this is exactly 20 kW in a steady cruise, and somewhat more if you use aircon or heating (around 5 kW) or drive in traffic. Over the course of 5 years, the expected battery efficiency (according to Renault, and who am I to dispute their figures? ) will drop to about half, so my estimate was on the generous side.

My present diesel car also stops when stationary - it's pretty well standard nowadays and bloody scary at times, but at least you can rely on a hot diesel restarting first time, just like an electric car.

"Average use 2 hr/day" is not a problem, it is the symptom of a solution: we use cars to take us from A to B: the profit, pleasure, or whatever, occurs at B, not in transit. Of course most office commuting is a waste of time, but that is the fault of social organisation, not a defect in the transport system. However you reorganise it with car hiring etc, the total number of person-miles remains constant and there is very little effect on total power consumption: you may need fewer cars, but each one works harder, like the 10 hour-per-day truck or bus, or the 24/7 taxi, for which I have already presented calculations.

Overnight charging of commuter cars makes some sense for a small number of cars, but actually doubles the grid power requirement for an all-electric fleet because you need to supply the whole lot in 12 hours instead of 24. And the main consumers of energy are trucks, buses and taxis, which run as close to 24/7 as they can manage.

"The car comes to you" is a further waste of energy. Unlike a horse, a car does not consume energy when waiting on your driveway for your pleasure. If it has to come to you from a depot, or even the next street, it is making a journey with no payload, so burning fuel for no purpose. Like the taxi, it is a better use of capital, but still doesn't solve the problem of an inadequate charging grid.

Whilst we might reduce the amount of pointless car commuting by a bit of reorganisation, we still need to move goods around, and people do actually like to travel, so we would do well to reduce the UK consumption from 150 to 120  GW - still twice as much as the existing grid capacity.

Here's a distantly related  thought. I can (and do) reduce my car travel by online shopping. It works for clothes because I only wear uniforms and overalls, but I prefer to eat food cooked from scratch. This means I must either rely on an unknown  kid in the supermarket to select the freshest stuff (and why would he? everyone else in the place is trying to sell the oldest stock first) or make a substitution that I would like, or order pre-packaged and processed food whose quality is guaranteed but contains as much food-miles and waste packaging as protein. In order to be reasonably "green" I have to get in the car and go to the market myself. 

I don't hold out much hope for "more efficient batteries" as a solution, since I assumed 100% efficiency in my calculations!

[David Cooper]

If you base your sums on how we do things now, you miss the picture of what could be done. Most cars moving around an in cities are carrying a ton of weight more than they need to, and they're doing so primarily in order to enable the vehicle to reach high speeds with a full load of passengers and luggage that have no relevance to towns. The world record for fuel consumption of a lightweight vehicle carrying just one person is (unless it's been bettered since) over 10,000mpg moving at around 15mph on an oval track (set by a Japanese team in an Ecomarathon at Alford in Scotland). That is an extreme situation, of course, but I would bet that a reasonably comfortable and practical machine could be designed for city transport capable of matching the 1,000mpg of a cyclist while enabling a speed of travel somewhere in the region of 25 to 30mph. With such light vehicles, you could have inexpensive flyovers at all junctions and make most journeys through town without ever having to stop or slow significantly. With computers monitoring the individual journeys of all vehicles, it will be possible to send them all on the best route to maximise throughput and minimise the energy used, for example, slowing vehicles a little for a long time if that allows them to maintain a more constant speed when they would otherwise have to slow dramatically to wait for a gap to open up for them on a perpendicular route that they need to switch onto. A lot of people wouldn't bother using their own vehicle for journeys around town any more if we had this system as they could call the nearest free public vehicle instead to take them wherever they need to go for less cost than taking a bus (and this would also lead to the elimination of buses and taxis), and there would be no issues with parking.

Moving goods around could similarly be revolutionised and doubtless will be once drivers are removed from the equation - instead of having a large van visit a long chain of different destinations, lots of smaller vehicles could deliver the same kind of things in more efficient ways without needing to move at high speed while the delivery times would improve - the key to this will be giving vehicles the ability to exchange items, possibly while moving along, and it might be possible to combine some of that with the public vehicles that would already be on the road moving people around. With rapid delivery to all the end destinations, the speed of transporting most goods over the long distances in between becomes less important, allowing more economical vehicles to do that job at lower speed, although we could make better use of railways if we had vehicles capable of switching between rail and road which can merge themselves into trains of pods when moving on rails and split off onto different lines without any of them slowing or stopping. With extra power supplied through the rails, these vehicles would be able to move faster in that mode than when on road without needing to carry more weight of battery.

I had hoped that China would take this route in their development, bypassing the gridlock that we're stuck in and creating something which they could then export to the rest of the world, but they blindly followed our development path instead and have chocked up their cities in the same mindless way as we have. Maybe they'll be the first to set to work undoing it though, replacing it with something more sane. I've been trying to get all these ideas through to the movers and shakers for the best part of three decades, but they're all as thick as two short planks and no one passes ideas on up. It should all have been well on the way by the turn of the millennium, but people seem determined to get on with the much more important business of toasting the planet and raising sea-level instead.

[alancalverd (OP)]

Road engineering suffers the same constraints as railways. To some extent you have to build within the bondaries of what already exists, without meanwhile screwing up existing traffic flows. And whilst various treehuggers like to put empty cycle tracks on busy main roads, what is left of the roadway must carry bikes, motorbikes, cars, vans, trucks, buses and fire engines. So a "lightweight flyover" just adds cost without reducing the power required to move people and goods from A to B. You can waste a lot of time and energy trying to build a house or factory  in a literal green field, and you still need access for emergency vehicles when it's finished, so common sense begins with at least an 8 foot roadway, and in a wet country like the UK, that means crushed rock and concrete.

We do have very efficient systems for transferring goods between road, rail and sea transport: the standard shipping container will take "30 tons of anything, anywhere on the planet" within a few weeks, and an air pallet (ULD) will move a ton of stuff to anywhere that has a runway within 24 hours, whence it can be repalletised in an hour for road transport. Groupage, rather than individual journeys, is the demonstrable path to efficiency for small consignments, and endpoint delivery by "white van" minimises the energy expended on the last mile by circumferential rather than radial routing.

"Removing drivers from the equation" sounds fun until the robotic white van arrives at my door, when I discover that you stole my consignment at the last stop, or I need help to operate the tail lift and drag the washing machine into the house. People are extraordinarly cheap, clever, versatile, and conscientious. Robots are not. 

By all means propose all sorts of personal city transport, but you are unlikely to come up with anything as fuel-efficient as a London bus (1.5 kW per passenger at 50 mph, 85 passengers in less road space than 10 cyclists) or as capital-efficient and educational as a London taxi (wheelchairs, prams, parcels, and up to 6 passengers, door-to-door with no need for overnight parking outside, and a free, comprehensive lecture on historic buildings, modern f****ing architecture, football and politics).

[Bored chemist]

Another way to estimate the energy use is to look at fuel use
http://www.cityam.com/261496/petrol-consumption-falls-record-low-january-fuel-prices
tells me that "UK drivers used a total of 1.35bn litres of petrol," in January
At 34 MJ per litre we get 4.6E 16 Joules
46PJ
Averaged over the month that's 17GW
Diesel is probably comparable  so we expend something like 40GW(th) on transport

If that's about 30% efficient then we actually use about 15GW

That's a lot, but it is an order of magnitude down on the OP's estimate.
It's about the same as the UK's installed wind power production
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom

so we could meet it by building as many wind farms as we already have.
since we built the ones we have, it's reasonable to see that we might build the same number again.

[David Cooper]

Road engineering suffers the same constraints as railways. To some extent you have to build within the bondaries of what already exists, without meanwhile screwing up existing traffic flows. And whilst various treehuggers like to put empty cycle tracks on busy main roads, what is left of the roadway must carry bikes, motorbikes, cars, vans, trucks, buses and fire engines. So a "lightweight flyover" just adds cost without reducing the power required to move people and goods from A to B. You can waste a lot of time and energy trying to build a house or factory  in a literal green field, and you still need access for emergency vehicles when it's finished, so common sense begins with at least an 8 foot roadway, and in a wet country like the UK, that means crushed rock and concrete.

You could get rid of cycle lanes and mix bicycles with the remaining heavy vehicles which could move at slower speed and still get from place to place in less time. If an emergency vehicle comes through, everyone would get out of its way. There are already lots of massive flyovers appearing in cities for heavy traffic, but this would eliminate the need for those and allow many more light ones to be put in instead.

We do have very efficient systems for transferring goods between road, rail and sea transport: the standard shipping container will take "30 tons of anything, anywhere on the planet" within a few weeks, and an air pallet (ULD) will move a ton of stuff to anywhere that has a runway within 24 hours, whence it can be repalletised in an hour for road transport. Groupage, rather than individual journeys, is the demonstrable path to efficiency for small consignments, and endpoint delivery by "white van" minimises the energy expended on the last mile by circumferential rather than radial routing.

It works well until you're dealing with small deliveries, but more and more deliveries are small with vans turning up to deliver little packages. If we don't find a better way of handling that soon, the skys will fill with a constant angry whine of drones delivering things by air.

"Removing drivers from the equation" sounds fun until the robotic white van arrives at my door, when I discover that you stole my consignment at the last stop, or I need help to operate the tail lift and drag the washing machine into the house. People are extraordinarly cheap, clever, versatile, and conscientious. Robots are not.

Any such theft would be filmed, so it won't happen. It would also be a lot cheaper to pay a local worker to turn up to help move the odd heavy item than having to pay someone to go round in the van all day.

By all means propose all sorts of personal city transport, but you are unlikely to come up with anything as fuel-efficient as a London bus (1.5 kW per passenger at 50 mph, 85 passengers in less road space than 10 cyclists)

Most people would rather pay less for a small vehicle to take them exactly where they want to go from and to and without lots of delays (waiting for a bus, and then enduring all the stops, as well as possibly having to change bus to complete a trip). And with such vehicles not needing any more power output than a professional cyclist (300W), that's five times more efficient than a full bus.

or as capital-efficient and educational as a London taxi (wheelchairs, prams, parcels, and up to 6 passengers, door-to-door with no need for overnight parking outside, and a free, comprehensive lecture on historic buildings, modern f****ing architecture, football and politics).

I'm sure a computer could provide them with lectures of superior quality, matched to the known interests of each passenger in their own lightweight taxi-pod, and even if you need to hire more than one of them to get your group around it will still save you a small fortune.

[alancalverd (OP)]

It's worth reading the small print in BC's source:

UK drivers used a total of 1.35bn litres of petrol, down one per cent from the same month last year and 12.7 per cent down on five years ago.

Diesel consumption also dropped 5.6 per cent to 2.1bn litres from 2.3bn litres.

Now given that January began with a public holiday, some schools were stil on holiday, diesel sales were nearly double those of petrol, and many large industries (particularly construction) shut down for 2 weeks over  Xmas-New Year, the average figure by BC's method looks well over 50 GW. However UK Petroleum Industry Association figures  are 45 x 10^9 liters per annum total, around 30% petrol and the rest diesel, at an average of 35 MJ/liter, which works out at 50 GW continuous, so I stand corrected.

But it's also important to read the small print on wind power. Whilst the current UK installed capacity is 15.5 GW, the actual performance rarely exceeds 30% of installed capacity and drops to an average of 13%  on summer nights and zero on the coldest winter days and nights. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom) Thus increasing wind generating capacity to at least 6 times its current level might just keep things moving most of the time, but not when you most need it on a frosty February morning. You might run some gas or coal fired power stations to keep the buses on the road, but it's a lot more efficient to put the fossil fuel straight into the tanks of road vehicles.

[timey]

Average use is say 2 hours per day

I think this is the biggest problem of today's consumer car industry. There are massive spikes of simultaneous usage (during which the roads become painfully slow), and long periods sitting unused. If this was some sort of economic calculation, you would have to say that it is an incredible waste of money.

I think Evan raises a good point here about the massive spikes of simultaneous usage.  Whether we are talking private, public, or logistical transport, the traditional notion of working hours reduces roads to snails pace as everyone seeks to get themselves to work and back home at similar times...

Why can't we have staggered working hours?
Where one has the choice to agree to arrive at work, for instance, between 5am and 1pm, and leave work between 1pm and 11pm, dependent on when one agreed to arrived.  This would take the pressure off the roads as a means of transporting the work force to and from their work, make the experience of using public transport as a means of getting to work quicker, in less crowded much more pleasant conditions, and ensure that deliveries to private addresses would have more flexible hours that can be met by recipients who are not at work themselves during those delivery hours.

I always thought the 9-5 remit was based around family and school requirements.  But this forced by circumstance time-table really doesn't apply to a significant percentage of people in this day and age.  A lot of people may prefer to work at more oddly kept hours.

*

Also -  The canals (UK, wonderful pieces of engineering), where historically busy thoroughfares of industrial transportation . The advent of trains as a means of industrial transportation did push the canals (rather rudely) into disservice.  Often posing some of the most direct routes across major cities, couldn't canals be brought back into service as a means of public transportation, electrically powered or otherwise, for short city journeys during peak travel times?

[evan_au]

in order to keep moving, we (would) need to supply 150 GW of electricity (assuming 100% battery efficiency).The present generating capacity available to the national grid is 55 GW

Are we comparing apples & oranges, here?
- The present electricity grid, which mostly carries domestically-generated electricity
- The present petrol/diesel distribution network, most of which carries imported fuels (although UK does produce around 60% of its natural gas requirements)

Before the growth in steam trains, steam-powered industrial processes and coal home heating in the 1700s, the coal distribution network would have been totally incapable of meeting the energy distribution needs of the 1800s; it needed to grow by several orders of magnitude. Due to its severe pollution levels, coal has now been banned for small-scale use (where pollutant removal is uneconomic), and is rapidly declining in large-scale power plants (where smokestack cleanup is feasible but expensive).
 
Before the growth in private automobiles in the 1900s, the petrol/diesel distribution network would have been totally incapable of meeting energy distribution needs of the early 2000s; it needed to grow by several orders of magnitude. It achieved its current capacity mainly by imports from the Middle East and Africa. But it is increasingly being recognised as a source of pollution in cities, and is subject to declining production capacity at existing and increased production risk/costs at planned oil wells (the Deep Water Horizon disaster is an example of the extreme conditions that new oil production fields will need to deal with).

To meet the energy needs of the late 2000s, we will need to beef up our electricity distribution networks - a mere 3x capacity increase sounds quite easy, by comparison with the previous technology revolutions.
- The UK's legendary cloudy weather does reduce solar panel output slightly - but non-concentrated solar panels still pick up diffuse sunlight from clouds.
- The legendary bad weather of the North Atlantic and North Sea provides plenty of opportunity for wind power - the wider the spread, the less likely it will becalmed simultaneously.
- And it would be entirely sensible to supplement local production by imports. North Africa and the Middle East has considerable amounts of sunshine; an electricity grid that crosses the straight of Gibralter and the English Channel/La Manche would be quite feasible.
 

[alancalverd (OP)]

Congestion is another problem altogether, and one to which small electric cars are perfectly suited since they don't use any power when stationary, and aerodynamic drag increases with the square of speed. My estimate was actually based more on "reps' mileage" than rush-hour commuting: I cover about 25,000 miles per year at an average of around 38 mph according to the vehicle computer, which works out at just under 2 hours per day. At 50 mpg my average power consumption is 2.3 kW over the year, but average moving consumption is indeed about 20 kW.

Flexible hours is indeed the answer to many problems. I'm taking a brief break from work now (just before midnight) with the intention of putting in another hour or so, then sleeping, watching cricket or walking the dog until about 10 am on Tuesday when the traffic has cleared for the next "300 mile day" with an afternoon's paydirt in the middle and returning home at 9 pm - or in the plane. The trick is to avoid "meetings" which are 90% wasted time, and attend the unavoidable ones by conference call from the car. And there are few pleasures greater than flying over the gridlocked M25 at 6 pm.

Canals are great for delivering huge quantities of coal, grain and iron ore. Problem is that we don't use coal or iron ore any more, and primary food processing tends to be done more and more close to the source - nobody drives live geese to Smithfield these days - and the product is then too perishable to be moved slowly. Commuting by barge would be great fun but however skilled you are with locks, Watford to London still takes a whole day. But the London river buses are cheaper and quicker than taxis. Rhine barges nowadays seem to carry mostly liquid fuels!

[alancalverd (OP)]

No point in improving the electricity distribution network if the source is unreliable. Far better to use wind power to make hydrogen or methane which we store and distribute through the existing or improved gas grid, and to synthesise diesel fuel from atmospheric CO2, as Audi are already doing. The efficiency of the  process is unimportant as the input is surplus wind-generated electricity  (which we are currently paying windmill operators for not generating!) and there is no need to replace existing machines, vehicles or distribution networks.

[evan_au]

make hydrogen or methane

I agree that hydrogen or methane could be a good way to store electricity temporarily - provided it can be created without using high temperatures. High temperatures means low efficiency.

Unfortunately, most appliances that use hydrogen or methane fall into the high-temperature trap, and just burn it. If not properly adjusted, they sometimes create carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen, which are undesirable pollutants.

To improve efficiency, we need enzymes that can create and break down the hydrogen and methane at low temperatures.

[alancalverd (OP)]

You can burn hydrogen or methane in a car engine with remarkably little modification, or use it (as we do now) to boil water in a a power station, or to make steel, glass, cement, etc, or drive the Haber-Bosch process. Or heat homes and hospitals, or provide hot water for just about every trade. Gas is a lot more use in industry than electricity.

[Bored chemist]

...Gas is a lot more use in industry than electricity.

I can burn gas + use it to make things hot.
In a relatively few cases I can use it as a chemical feed-stock.
I can use electricity to make light, heat, motion etc.
I look forward to seeing your gas powered radio (no cheating + making electricity) or even your gas powered arc furnace.
Gas powered aluminium production's interesting.
Basically- in almost every case, if you can do it with gas, you can do it electrically, but the converse is not true.

[alancalverd (OP)]

Ah, the joy of Wikipedia:

Energy use in the United Kingdom stood at...... 2,249 TWh in 2014......Demand for electricity in 2014 was 301.7TWh over the year.

In other words, 87% of our energy consumption was not in the form of electricity. Even assuming that some of the total was used to make electricity at 50% efficiency (i.e. no "free" sources of electricity) that still leaves 75% consumed directly as fossil fuel.

So why not stick with the technologies we already have, and use unreliable electricity generation to make gas (and oil?) that we can store in simple tanks, distribute through the existing networks, and use directly?

Apropos aluminium production, almost all of it nowadays is traceable to coal- or gas-fired electrical generation. There just isn't enough hydroelectricity to meet demand.   

Electricity is useful stuff but for the foreseeable future it is always going to be the expensive option. 

[evan_au]

an aside...

Attracted by the latest Tesla X in a showroom

Last night, I saw that they also have set up a showroom in the heart of the Sydney CBD.
Presumably, they have updated their highway lane-pilot software to cope with cars that drive on the other side of the road....

But our local road laws have not kept pace with technology, so you are still not allowed to use it.