sci.energy

There's an interesting article here on forecasting electricity demand
in the UK. Particularly interesting is the demand graph:

/1/hi/sci/tech/

Some conclusions:
- If Britain's 30 million cars were replaced by Electric Vehicles
today, there is today enough spare capacity to charge all of them, as
long as the timing of the charging can be controlled.
- EVs would not be as low carbon as desired, since "Most of the
flexibility is provided by fossil fuel power stations where it's
easier to vary the output than, for example, a nuclear plant,"(*) so
night time marginal consumption would be mostly coal and gas, giving a
vehicle CO2 output of about 100g/km/ton.
- Solar Voltaic power in Britain is pretty useless as it contributes
nothing between and in the Winter. Of course, this is
not the case for southern USA.
- The British energy crunch forecast for about 2015 is to some extent
about how to provide 5GW over 3 hours (15 GW hrs).
- Natural gas? Expensive fuel but low capital cost.
- Energy storage (VRB, compressed air etc,)? Very low fuel cost
but high capital cost.
- Centrally controlled micro CHP generation (for example, 2
million domestic boiler / generators is 10% of households - the grid
would be allowed to turn on your boiler and buy electricity from you).

(*) Note: It's not necessarily easier, but for a nuclear plant the
fuel is a small part of the cost, so it doesn't make economic sense to
turn the reactor down.