> What do we need a 10-100 fold increase in generation for? Have you got a reference?
"The US consumes 25% of the world's energy with a share of global GDP at 22% and a share of the world population at 4.6%" [1]
This means the US consumes 5.4 more energy per capita than the average human on Earth. If you hope for a world where the non-US population reaches the same life standard as the US, you need to increase the energy production by this factor.
Now, in the US, only 38% of the energy consumption is electricity generation [2]. The rest is tranportation, industrial, residential and commercial sectors. Making the huge assumption that you can replace every BTU in these other sectors with one BTU of electricity, you would need to increase the electricity production by another factor of 2.6. More realistically, any replacement of a non-electricity BTU with some electric energy will have an efficiency well below 100%, let's say 30%. You then need a factor of 6.4.
So far we get to a total factor of 5.4 x 6.4 = 35. Quite close to the (logarithmic) mid-point between 10 and 100, wouldn't you say?
>If you hope for a world where the non-US population reaches the same life standard as the US, you need to increase the energy production by this factor.
I think this is a mistake - the US is energy wasteful compared to places like Europe which has a similar standard of living.
There is a strong emphasis on energy efficiency in Europe, plus higher density living meaning more efficient transport etc.
In the [1] wiki page you quoted it shows that the US is ~2 fold worse at energy efficiency than leading European countries and the trend in Europe is to be increasingly efficient.
If you build in energy efficiency during the development of countries, in theory the savings could be even greater.
In terms of US quality of life, it's not just energy consumption that drives it, it's available natural resources and the hegemony of the dollar in world markets.
ie there are large contributions from other factors to US GDP that you can't match by increasing energy use - ie the real underlying US productivity per energy unit is even worse that it appears.
In summary the US is a bit of an outlier not a benchmark.
Finally - obviously the original story is in the context of UK supply - not world - so there was some misunderstanding on what your numbers applied to.
The point: we should not be aiming for net-zero energy, we should be aiming for net-zero energy, and a ten or a hundred fold increase in generation.