I listened to this podcast: an interview about Electrifying the home, and America, with Saul Griffiths and Arch Rao.
Griffiths has a great ability to speak in rules of thumb. Averages. Things that give you a sense of scale, of orders of magnitude.
I've realised that, although I've worked in energy for a while, I don't naturally think in those kinds of rules of thumb.
I'm also trying to insulate/electrify an old, leaky house in the East Midlands. Working out how best to do it. Should I get solar? Should I get heat pumps? Should I get cavity wall insulation? Do my walls have cavities?
This it turns out, is not easy. And some of that is because everyone is an expert in their own little field but very few people are good at putting it in context or explaining it to non-experts.
Here, from the podcast, is the kind of things Griffiths says / knows :
"The average US household today has two cars in the garage that burn petrol or gasoline or diesel, and it has natural gas heating and it uses about 25 kWh per day of electrical energy. If you electrify both of the vehicles in that household you'll add about another 25 kWh per day to the load of that house. And if electrify the heat you'll add about another 20 kWh again. For the majority of US homes, and this is true around the world in fact, when we electrify...you're going to double or triple the loads in that house."
"Rooftop solar is now providing 5 cent per kWh electricity in Australia"
So, I'm trying to research for myself, and document here, equivalent rules of thumb for the UK. I suspect looking it up and working it out will help me remember and understand.
Here's a start:
Ovo have a handy post that says "the average household uses 3,731 kWh per year". That's based on BEIS data. (From this page, I think). They then immediately start caveating about averages and types of home and all that, which is fair enough. But I'm going to stick at the higher level, because I just want a sense of things. And because, conveniently, 3,731 kWh per year equates to, roughly, 10 kWh per day.
(As a quick check, if you Google "how much electricity does a uk house use per day" the snippet you get says 8 - 10 kWh. There's a lot of SEOing going on in this answer. And lots of people re-using / re-writing the same content. But this seems to be an acceptable rule of thumb.)
If you want help visualising that, Arcadia have a good page, 1 kWh is enough to operate two desktop computers (or six laptops) during a standard workday. Or, if you do 65mph on a motorway, you can drive about 5 miles on 1 kWh.
According to BEIS (and everyone in SEOland) the average cost for 1 kWh of electricity was 17.2p in 2020.
And, according to this page, apparently, the fuel mix of the UK grid means that 1 kWh of electricity produces 0.233 kg of CO2e. That's about the weight of a hamster or two blueberry muffins.
So, rules of thumb:
UK households use about 10 kWH of electricity per day.
That's enough to drive about 50 miles in an EV
It'll cost you about £2.
And produce about 2kg of CO2e.
Obviously if I've got all this horribly wrong, please let me know.