by Exponent » Tue 25 Jul 2006, 17:47:16
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('grabby', 'E')very person takes 2 kwh per day average in the US. That is electricy.
but each person drives 2 gallons per day in the us of gasoline or diesel aveage.
each gallon has 35 kwh per gallon
so in gasoline use we use 70 kwh per day
So I have a great idea.
lets take you average joe using 2 kwh per day and give him an electric car, which he can pulg into the grid and charge it up.
suddenly joe sucks 35 time more electricity from the grid than he used to.
(this also would help the electric stressed grid to straighten up)
whats with all these brown outs, I think if we just increase our electriciy use 35 times it would really help all the problems of peak oil and grid overload, dont you?
sure lets try it, never know what is going to happen till you try it.
Where'd the 2 kW·h per day per person figure come from? I tried looking for such figures, but I didn't find anything directly. I did find
this report from the EIA, however, and got a total of 3,841,828,177 MW·h for the entire year, for the entire USA. Divide that by 365.242375 days (
source), and that by 296,410,404 people (
source), you get 35.4865138 kW·h.
Taking the calculation further, to try to verify other numbers given, the USA apparently used 6,758,653,000 barrels of finished oil products in 2005 (
source), or 777,191,929 gallons per day. (If you limit it to just finished motor gasoline, you get 383,016,374 gallons per day). Per person, that would be 2.622 gallons per person per day (1.292 for motor gasoline). Which does seem to agree with the ~2 gallons per person per day, depending on how one chooses data. (I include everyone, drivers or not, for example, lowering the figures a bit for motor gasoline.)
Assuming an average energy content of 124,000 BTU per gallon of gasoline (
source), or 35.96 kW·h that means that an average person in the USA uses 46.46 kW·h per day on gasoline.
So if everyone switched over to electric vehicles, then according to my numbers (which may have been poorly researched, let me know if you see a problem), we would have to increase our electricity generation by an additional 131%. So we would have to more than double it, but it's still nowhere near having to increase it tenfold.
Not that I'm trying to prove anything whatsoever with these numbers. I was just bored and wanted to find out what numbers my research might yield.
[edit]Of course, I just realize that I was too lazy and failed to take into account all the efficiency things. Maybe that could have an effect. Oh well.[/edit]