Electricity consumption isn't linear (people use far less when they are sleeping), and production isn't zero at night (wind and hydro exist). Covering 12 hours is almost certainly overkill.

> Covering 12 hours is almost certainly overkill

"640k ought to be enough for anybody" :) I'm sure with more electricity available, prices would drop, meaning people will use more electricity and so on. Just like desktop applications and available system RAM, I guess some things just consume what becomes available.

Maybe a business, certainly not the average person. And whether or not they use it will be determined by price more than anything. If the added batteries and renewables don't translate to appreciable decreases in energy prices then I don't see people using more electricity just because it's available.

The other thing that prevents an individual from using more is that electricity usage creates heat.

Of course. It just means the estimation of "years of battery production" (and its implicit "we can't possibly produce that much so the transition is doomed to fail") isn't as big of a deal as it might seem at first glance.

Those numbers sound worse than they are.

Storage production capacity is still rising much faster than energy consumption in all those nations, and the situation is probably quite similar with other pieces of infrastructure that last for decades; replacing all big electric transformers would similarly need many years of production.

Primary energy considerations are also somewhat iffy if the first step involved is often a ~40% efficient conversion into a form similarly "valuable" to electricity (like gasoline => motion).

The numbers are as they are now.

For future energy consumption I would look to India, which is on the same energy growth path as China 20 years ago. And there are many countries with low per capita energy consumption but high potential. Like Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt,..

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/indonesia

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/malaysia

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/egypt

I agree that efficiency of electric motor + battery is much higher that ICE. ICE cars are now slowly replaced with EV cars. About 42% of oil is refined to gasoline, but much of oil is refined to diesel, jet fuel and used in transportation which is harder to convert to EV, like long-haul trucking, or much harder to convert to EV, like international shipping, air transport.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

" efficiencies of up to 43% for passenger car engines, up to 45% for large truck and bus engines, and up to 55% for large two-stroke marine engines"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine#Efficiency

"By generating power from multiple streams of work, the overall efficiency can be increased by about 50–60%. That is, from an overall efficiency of say 43% for a simple cycle with the turbine alone running, to as much as 64% net with the full combined cycle running"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant

You mean we've barely begun building battery plants and China can already build more than enough batteries for themselves in less than a decade? Holy crap that's amazing news!

As you are predicting increase in the production capacity of future battery plants, I'm predicting increase in the future electric energy consumption - especially China. It will interesting to see how the fraction battery production to electric consumption, will evolve in the future.

No doubt. At least until now battery production capacity has by far outstripped growth in electricity consumption.