Sure some people are replacing incandescents with CFLs or LEDs but others are replacing a single light fitting for the room with a load of downlights.
My mate has gone LED big-time. Lounge - 15x7W downlighters (105W). Kitchen 10x7W downlighters, plus 8x?W under cupboard lights (>100W total)
We are also adding ever more electronics to our homes.
Indeed we are.
IIRC, there are about 30 million cars in the UK. If they all became electric and were all charged at the same time, at 10kW each, that would be an additional load of about 300,000 MW - which, I imagine, in itself, considerably exceeds the country's current total generation capabilities!!
It does, by some considerable margin ! Current capacity is something in the order of 60GW for a round figure to work with.
You may find the
NETA site quite interesting - not least laugh (or cry) at the Peak Wind generation Forecast which as I write this is 2100MW today and 1189MW tomorrow - out of a metered capacity of 7136MW, so 29% today and 17% tomorrow. However the lastest forecast value for period 47 tomorrow shows as dropping to just 427MW (or just 6% of capacity - good job it's summer and we're not dependent on it !). But I digress ...
At the bottom of that page is 2-52 Weeks Ahead Output Usable By Fuel Type (graph) where you'll find out what the forecast capacity is. It seems to peak at the end of the year, with about 78GW total - but that includes the full "rating plate" capacity of everything including intermittent sources like pumped storage (3GW) and wind (6.5GW) - and assumes full capacity of interconnectors (ie assumes that the French, Dutch, and Irish all have spare capacity to sell us, 4GW total).
At the moment we still have over 9GW of nuclear - most to be shut down in the next few years. Nearly 22GW of coal - a lot of which will be closing before too long.
I've had some "interesting" conversations with people who can't (or just won't ?) understand that a forecourt supping around a megawatt to provide anything like a useful fast charge for a sensible number of cars just cannot be connected to the local network without some seriously expensive engineering. Apparently it will all run off a normal commercial supply like they already have
That's why the IC engine is so good for transport - the energy density of liquid fuels like petrol, diesel, and LPG is very high. And it's not just the energy density, but the ease with which very high equivalent powers can be transferred - hence the 1MW figure above which came (IIRC) some years ago from some back of an envelope calculation for a typical forecourt capacity.