the future

when did or have we or when will we reach general peak use of electricity in our homes?

lighting is obvious, with the use of Led lighting we are consuming less.

insulation, insulation etc is reducing consumption for heating along with newer property construction.

will the scarcity and cost of gas mean we have to use more electricity?

The electric car will involve massive use of our supply network

Are you including China, India and Brazil?

A few million kw's worth of stored charge (electric cars on charge overnight) will create some interesting possibilities.

17thman said:

lighting is obvious, with the use of Led lighting we are consuming less.

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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.

We are also adding ever more electronics to our homes.

And UFH instead of wearing slippers/socks/having appropriate floor coverings.

Shops can still buy warm air curtains to use instead of doors.

17thman said:

when did or have we or when will we reach general peak use of electricity in our homes?

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Despite it being a Welsh website, these are UK figures:
Click for 1920 –present
Click for 2002-present
It looks as if, at least for the time being, we are probably ‘past the peak’ in the UK.

Kind Regards, John

Interesting John. maybe due to decline in manufacturing.. Maybe due to more efficient lighting. maybe due to the more common use of combi boilers? (that must be a massive factor)I know many have loads of flushed spots, but as we change to led, then consumption will reduce further.

As we go towards electric cars (if we do) i wonder how much energy will be wasted in leaving uncharged cars on a drive for days while the batteries slowly discharge compared to the evaporation of petrol.

17thman said:

Interesting John. maybe due to decline in manufacturing.. Maybe due to more efficient lighting. maybe due to the more common use of combi boilers? (that must be a massive factor)I know many have loads of flushed spots, but as we change to led, then consumption will reduce further.

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Many factors, I'm sure, but I would imagine that domestic lighting is one of the more significant - after all, 'a few hundred watts' worth of incandescen lighting was/is by no means uncommon.

I gather that the electricity consumption per capita in the UK has been falling for many years but that, until fairly recently, the increase in population more than cancelled that.

17thman said:

As we go towards electric cars (if we do) i wonder how much energy will be wasted in leaving uncharged cars on a drive for days while the batteries slowly discharge compared to the evaporation of petrol.

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I guess that's one of the big questions, which has the potential to dramatically change electricity usage. However, I have a suspicion that electric cars run on secondary (i.e. chargeable) batteries may never become a big thing, if they get overtaken by developments in fuel cell (or some other) technology.

Kind Regards, John

I would say that the infrastructure and design of our big cities will not allow mass use of electric car charging. imagine the demand required upon our existing service cables. for me it will not take off without substantial improvements. Consider the massive opportunities of the developing economies to lay cable appropriate for this demand during the building of their new cities and conurbations. Aftrica and virgin land including lots of sunlight, its the way forward, lets buy shares in it.

17thman said:

I would say that the infrastructure and design of our big cities will not allow mass use of electric car charging. imagine the demand required upon our existing service cables. for me it will not take off without substantial improvements. Consider the massive opportunities of the developing economies to lay cable appropriate for this demand during the building of their new cities and conurbations. Aftrica and virgin land including lots of sunlight, its the way forward, lets buy shares in it.

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Yes, I agree with all that. As I said, I think I'd be a little surprised if electric cars using rechargable batteries ever gets big in 'already-developed' countries, but what you say about teh other countries could well come to be true.

Kind Regards, John

The Tesla model S can add 31 miles worth of range each hour at 10kw (~50A @240v). A couple of hours of that a night is enough for most people's commute.

Doesn't seem too bad, certainly not more than using storage heaters.

There could be local by laws dictating alloted hours of overnight charging according to which phase you are on

ivixor said:

The Tesla model S can add 31 miles worth of range each hour at 10kw (~50A @240v). A couple of hours of that a night is enough for most people's commute. Doesn't seem too bad, certainly not more than using storage heaters.

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... but that would be in addition to whatever storage heaters are still in use. 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!! Even if one implemented 17thman's proposal of formally staggered charging times, that would only reduce the instantaneous load by a factor of about 4 - so still a massive increase in loading.

... and, don't forget, there are already concerns about whether our generation capabilities are going to be able to serve needs in the future, even without this massive additional load. I would imagine that nothing other than predominantly nuclear-generated electricity would stand any chance of servicing the country if electric cars which needed charging became predominant, and even that (and the associated network upgrading) would probably take many decades to implement.

Kind Regards, John

plugwash said:

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.

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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.

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Indeed we are.

JohnW2 said:

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!!

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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.

SimonH2 said:

My mate has gone LED big-time. Lounge - 15x7W downlighters (105W). Kitchen 10x7W downlighters,

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25 lights for 2 rooms.

That's more than I have in my entire house.