If you had to push a car from Ajax to Thorold, which is incidentally up hill, you would quickly discover that that takes a lot of energy. Right now, for almost everyone, that work is done by burning fossil fuels. Which has to stop. But the electric car you need doesn’t get free energy by being electric. In order to do that same amount of work, the amount of energy we get from gas and diesel has to be replaced joule for joule with increased electrical energy production.
And transportation as well as industry and heating and cooling, supplied by carbon sources, are a huge fraction of our entire energy budget. To transition to carbon-free electricity we are going to need vast increases in the amount we generate. It is unlikely to be an exaggeration that our core generating capacity will have to double at least a couple of times to increase our electricity production by enough to offset depreciating other energy sources. In the end, with other factors included, no one should be surprised if it turns out that we need an order of magnitude more generation.
And while we hide the sad truth under “renewables” most of the minority of electrical generation that is called renewable is hydro, which cannot be responsibly increased, or biofuels which are a dead-end source of more greenhouse gasses. Only a tiny fraction of electrical generation is wind and solar, which is what you are hoping people are thinking you mean when you talk about green energy. It is simply a delusion that we are going to produce four or ten times as much electrical energy as we do now without new investment in nuclear power. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably means well, but has no idea what they are talking about.
