Today, the US grid delivers, on average, 450 gigawatts (GW) of electricity. If we electrify nearly everything, as I described in the previous chapter, we’ll need 1,500–1,800 GW. That’s a lot. If we use solar alone, that’s more than we can fit on all of our rooftops, and more than we can erect over our parking spaces (see figure 7.1). If we added wind turbines in all of the corn fields in America, that would supply about half of what we need.
That’s about 15 quads (293 TWh) per year against our current annual energy use of 100 quads. This implies that 45-50 quads will be enough if it is in electric form rather than burning of fuels
