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I'm not talking about electricity alone, but about primary power consumption. That includes heat and fuel for your car, and also all the energy consumed by domestic industry. It's about 2.5155×10^13 kWh, or 81,800 kWh per person (in 2009)[1]. You're of course right that just electricity is much easier.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Pr...

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It's always a red flag when "primary" energy comes up. Something like 3/4s of that primary energy will be wasted as heat while being converted into useful energy, and so renewables have a 4x advantage just by their very nature of directly making electricity.

(They also have a 4x advantage even if generating heat is the actual purpose, but for different reasons.)

Sure, if you take that into account you still need several kW of average energy production. Unless you live in a very sunny area that's a lot of panels. Panels in Germany for example get about 10-15% of their peak rating if you average over the year.

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