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Britain will need to boost its generation of electricity by about a quarter, Scottish Power has estimated.
The energy firm said electric cars and a shift to electric heating could send demand for power soaring.
Its chief executive also said there would have to be a major investment in the wiring necessary to handle rapid charging of car batteries.
Is the net demand for energy really spiking, or is it merely shifting from one source to another?
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Scottish Power Says UK Will Need to Boost Capacity
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There's no such thing as an original sin.
-- Elvis Costello
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:00PM (1 child)
Is this really the question?
The story is about Electrical Generation needing to be increased.
As we switch to electric cars, that energy we USED TO consume as gasoline will need to be replaced by electricity.
Soon-ish we aren't going to have the gasoline, so the question of shifting sources is moot. Its a forced shift. Not a whim or a fad. We won't be putting that gas to other uses.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by tomtomtom on Tuesday September 26 2017, @09:56PM
One interesting statistic is that energy (as opposed to electricity) usage per capita is now going down in most developed economies. Newer housing and offices need far less energy to heat due to better insulation, only partially offset by growing need and desire for air conditioning. Household appliances are getting more energy efficient which more than offsets the greater number of them people tend to have. And perhaps most importantly, heavy industry is also continuing to move offshore. This is offset by growth in population and faster growth in the number of households. The overlaying factors for electricity are then changes to energy sources households use for heat and cooking (driven in the UK at least partly by some volume housebuilders cutting costs by not installing mains gas), and the big unknown - electric cars. They are such a small proportion of the total fleet today that they just aren't relevant to national energy consumption and noone really knows how much of the market they will eventually control - on the one hand you have governments setting soundbite targets like "no more ICEs by 2040", but on the other hand adoption has been slow to date and nothing has really happened to change that.