[rookderby]

One issue in this calculation is that you'd need to increase the amount of electricity generated to replace heating and other work done by fossil fuels. From Saul Griffith's book Electrify, "Electrifying everything will require three to four times as much electricity." [0].

490 * 3 = 1470TWh capacity, or I guess about three 100W light bulbs per day?

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

[hedora]

What coefficient of power does the book assume for heating air and water?

Our water heater is a heat pump, and draws about 100w on average. It has a COP of 3-4. The house idles at 500w, with it on. I probably have about 100w of computers, and the balance is probably refrigerators (still optimizing the house...)

Anyway, switching to a heat pump changes heating from the dominant load to "maybe I should power down the backup NAS and a switch or two".

[maerF0x0]

Going to comment here as it's on topic with books.

One should also read "Without Hot Air" [1] and "Heat"[2] to understand the math and psychology of sustainability . the Tl;dr; being we'd need to cover an area, iirc, the entire Sahara desert with solar to provide solar for humanity (ignoring the problem of distribution, cost, how long it would take to do, maintenance). And then you also have to account for the psychological effect of "green" energy whereby people end up consuming _more_ because in their minds they discount the ecological cost to 0

My main conclusion (not the authors') is that we need nuclear[3] (maybe thorium). It's the only thing that scales the way we need.

[1]: https://withouthotair.com/

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1114270.Heat

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BybPPIMuQQ (and the rest of gordonmcdowell's channel