I'm curious as to how this will shift once the shift towards more electrification continues. This is only about electricity generation, not total power consumption.
Nowadays, for very energy intenive things like heating or driving a car, fossil fuels still are more prevalent than electric alternatives. Once demand shifts in favor of the electrified alternatives, electricity demand is continuing to raise (although not as steep as the drop in demand for the fossil fuels will be). Particularly in heating, where peak demand is in times with very little solar generation, it seems like this will be challenging.
While the prices of energy storage have come down significantly and are projected to continue to drop, there is still a noteable lack of cost effective long term storage solutions.
> Particularly in heating, where peak demand is in times with very little solar generation, it seems like this will be challenging.
Heating is actually likely to be one of the easier questions here, because heat is just fundamentally an easier problem to tackle than most other intensive uses of energy in the modern world.
1. Solar isn't the only incredibly cheap form of intermittant renwewable energy production. Wind is also great, tends to support local manufacturing economies more than solar, and is anti-correlated with peak-sunshine. The wind tends to blow hardest in the winter and around sunset.
2. Heatpumps can pretty comfortably achieve 300+% coefficients of performance, meaning that for every joule of energy you put into a heatpump, you'll get 3+ joules of heat pumped into your home, office, or city-scale heat thermos
3. Heat energy storage is cheap compared to batteries. You just store large quantities of water or sand and heat it up with a resistor or a heat pump. The scaling of surface area versus volume ensures that the bigger you make the heat-battery, the less energy you'll lose from it over time (percentage wise).
4. Heat is a waste product from many other forms of energy usage, and can be harnessed. For instance, gas peaker plants aren't going away any time soon, and cities which aren't harnessing the waste heat from those peaker plants and using it in a district heating system are wasting both money and carbon.
Just a couple kilometers from my home for instance is a gas power plant that stores waste heat in giant thermoses, and pumps hot water to my building to to be used for heating. They currently have the largest heat pump in europe under construction on the same site intended to supplement the gas plant, both to take up slack from the fact that it'll be running less often, and to expand the service to yet more households.
Regarding the affect of EV adoption on electricity consumption the site https://robbieandrew.github.io/EV/ has some interesting data. I'd recommend looking at the following graphs:
* Distance travelled by passenger cars in Norway
* EV electricity consumption and total power generation in Norway
EVs now make up approximately 1/3 of miles travelled, but the increase in total electrcity consumption is fairly small.
This is just objectively untrue. Source: I live in Germany, a country with some of the highest electricity prices, I drive a BEV and I heat my home with a heatpump. My systems SCOP hovers around 3.5, which means that my kWh of heat made from my heatpump with electricity is cheaper than my current gas rate.
My heatpump electricty bill is significantly lower as compared to my apartment (Gas furnace), despite both buildings being roughly comparable late 80s construction.
I charge my car at my standard electrcity rate of 32ct/kWh, and I pay now about half for the same usage.
Electricity is expensive, yeah. But electrified stuff is also significantly more efficient than fossil tech
You pay less vs gas heating because of co2 tax.
And it's just an individual case. Germany's electrification percent is lower vs China's amd the rate of changing is lower too. In other words Germany has more energy used indirectly instead of electricity and electrification percent increase per year is lower than China's too
Amd Germany isn't even the worst example in terms of electricity prices. UK is even worse which will slow it down even more
Nowadays, for very energy intenive things like heating or driving a car, fossil fuels still are more prevalent than electric alternatives. Once demand shifts in favor of the electrified alternatives, electricity demand is continuing to raise (although not as steep as the drop in demand for the fossil fuels will be). Particularly in heating, where peak demand is in times with very little solar generation, it seems like this will be challenging.
While the prices of energy storage have come down significantly and are projected to continue to drop, there is still a noteable lack of cost effective long term storage solutions.