California Electricity Usage

Being aware of the gas usage of your car awakes a wider interest in energy among most people. If you feel curious to know how much electric energy gets used by California, this page will show you. It plots the electrical energy used by the state of California and the available capacity, updating about every 15 minutes.

If you want to compare this to the power generated by the combustion of gasoline in California, we can look here to see that California uses somewhat more than a billion gallons of gasoline per month. That works out to about 30 million gallons per day. From Wikipedia, we see that the energy content of gasoline works out to about 132 million Joules per gallon. That means that the combustion of gasoline in California generates an average power of 50 billion Watts or 50,000 megaWatts. Looking at the green available resources forecast line on the chart, we see California can supply up to 32,000 Megawatts of electricity.

The electricity infrastructure of California would have to be almost tripled if it were ever to provide for all of the current energy needs as well as replacing the use of gasoline. That is assuming the gasoline combustion is evenly spread out over the 24 hours of the day. Any bunching of this in time would elevate the peak demand, in turn requiring that the electric system increase possibly considerably beyond three times current capacity.

It is not an easy thing to replace gasoline gallons with electric volts!