According to the Digest of UK Energy Statistics (DUKES) 2010 published by the UK Government we use nearly 7M tonnes of diesel and 15.5M tonnes of petrol or gasoline in our cars and taxis. So how much electricity would we need to generate if we replaced all our national fleet of fossil fuel powered vehicles with electric ones?

7M tonnes of diesel and 15.5M tonnes of petrol contains 277 TWh of energy. According to the same report, the UK electricity industry delivered 326.1 TWh of energy to its users – simplistically we’d need to increase our capacity by 85%.

However an electric car is far more efficient than one powered by an internal combustion engine (88% vs 35%) so it does far more useful work for the same amount of input energy. 277 TWh put into a fleet of ‘normal’ cars will do 97 TWh of useful work, whereas an electric fleet will do the equivalent useful work with only 110 TWh of input energy.

So what if all cars became electric?

Allowing for transmission and distribution losses across the grid, around 9%, we find we need to generate 122 TWh of electricity – equivalent to roughly 25,000 wind turbines or 34 nuclear power plants.

At frictionfree we explore, develop and commercialise technology which reduces friction during creative and business processes.

Ideas which become successful products are frequently those ideas which elegantly eliminate or reduce friction during a particular part of a process.  We define friction as a barrier to achieving a given outcome that is inherent to the technology or approach being adopted to achieve the outcome. Often these barriers are so fundamentally tied to the usual way of doing something most of us aren’t even aware they’re barriers at all.  The ‘frictionfree’ breakthrough comes when someone spots the barrier and comes up with an idea and demonstrates “it doesn’t need to be this way”.

Some frictionfree technologies take a process and make it much easier, rarely truly revolutionary frictionfree technology eliminate a process altogether unlocking for us the ability to do things which may have been previously impossible.

An example of the latter is writing, before mankind discovered writing – we could really only communicate orally, so if you had a message to pass to a village thousands of miles away it had to be relayed through a chain of transmitters. If you were a village chief and you wanted to let your descendants know how a great a chief you were, you would again have to rely on oral transmission although this time you were passing messages down generations (time) rather than along neighbours (space). One break in the chain led to the entire process failing and the likelihood that the message received was what you actually said, was very low (copying errors or mutations). Writing eliminated these barriers whilst at the same time giving us the ability to store and build upon information from previous generations, hence I guess why we have the common idea that if a man is ‘lettered’ he is someone who is cultured.

Other frictionfree tech usually falls into the first category and is valuable because it makes peoples lives easier.  The Amazon 1-Click online shopping process allows a user to complete a purchase online with a single click using previously entered payment and shipping details. Whether the technology should have been granted a patent is debatable (the European Patent Office doesn’t think so) but it’s value to ecommerce, as Apple licencing it to use in it’s App Store demonstrates, isn’t.