I have an Ecotec Pro 24. It's rated to 30kW. That's so I can have a decent shower. You could maybe run 2 showers off it, if you both don't mind low pressure and the heating is off.

I'm a brit in a small 3 bed 2 bath terrace house (I think you call them row houses in the US? Assuming you're American, apologies if that's wrong!).

30kW at 120V is 250A (it's actually more because of ACs power function). That's way above what a standard house or a domestic supply is designed to sustain.

Now add to that that this huge peak power is very synchronised. You, your neighbours and everyone else in your neighbourhood shower around the same times. And those aren't times renweables are most available. This is no problem for gas because you can store gas and pump it out as needed. But for electricity? You'll need to revamp your grid, forget non-constant renewables like wind or solar (I'm a fan of both but they're not suitable). And you need to build a tonne of capacity that won't be used 90% of the time.

This is the killer app for gas.

Thanks for describing your use case, this is helpful! The problem with gas is, of course, that it emits CO2 when burned or leaks methane in distribution pipelines when not burned at a consumption point. For electrical use, you absolutely do not have to revamp the grid. Before heat pump hot water heaters, and even today, there are mechanisms where hot water heaters were/are turned on when there is cheap or excess power on the grid [1]. We would do the same today: the hot water in an insulated tank is the battery. We can keep hot liquids hot relatively affordably.

For the vast majority of use cases, heat pump hot water heaters are a reasonable solution [2] (unless you've got enormous demand within a short window of time, our heat pump hot water heater holds ~80 gallons at 120F). There is of course still work to be done for use cases where boilers are superior (high rises), but that doesn't mean it isn't solvable. I'm aware of a lot of folks in row homes in Australia who are successfully using heat pump hot water heaters!

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=load+shifting+water+heaters

[2] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/water-heating/heat-pump-w...

Gas is actually astoundingly clean to burn, especially given how much energy it stores. It's why farmers use huge tanks of it to burn weeds before seeding / forklifts use propane indoors as fuel.

Once you start looking at the emissions incurred by transmission loss, extra "peak" power purchased from states like Nevada and Oregon this stupid fantasy of electric everything solving the world's problems sans dealing with the production side fades quickly.

Also relevant: https://rmi.org/all-electric-new-homes-a-win-for-the-climate... (All-Electric New Homes: A Win for the Climate and the Economy)

"The new all-electric, single-family home has a lower net present cost than the new mixed-fuel home in every city we studied: Austin, TX; Boston, MA; Columbus, OH; Denver, CO; Minneapolis, MN; New York City, NY; and Seattle, WA."

"In every city we analyzed, a new all-electric, single-family home is less expensive than a new mixed-fuel home that relies on gas for cooking, space heating, and water heating. Net present cost savings over the 15-year period of study are as high as $6,800 in New York City, where the all-electric home also results in 81 percent lower carbon emissions over the mixed-fuel home."

Agree to disagree. Clean energy transmission losses are always preferable to more carbon emissions (as we're already over our carbon budget). Nevada has a lot of clean solar potential, and the PNW is mostly clean hydro.

Enough sunlight hits the Earth in an hour to power all of humanity for a year; electrification of everything is therefore quite reasonable.

That's fine, but we just got through removing hot water tanks from people's house because they're so inefficient. So again, you're gonna need a lot of renewables to power all this extra demand.