Oil and gas is not ideal for the electric grid because it is needed for mobile industrial equipment and will run out in the next 60 years.
The predominant uses of electricity is in buildings. Somewhere between half and 95% of electricity is used for Heating, cooling, and lighting. Lighting can be reduced by using more natural sun windows and red LED lights at night. Geothermal systems can store heat in deep wells in the summer and use it in the winter, compared with traditional systems that release the heat to the outside air. These are all components of green buildings.
Nearly half of electricity is lost in transmission so I find it hard to believe half to 95% is used for heating. To find a better way to transfer the electricity could make a huge impact. Some natural gas is used to produce electricity and some coal. The burning if coal can be done fairly efficiently with new technologies, however you will always have those trying to do things as cheap and easy as possible. We have natural gas and petroleum to last more than 60 years, the problem is it becomes more expensive and disruptive to get it. People often over look the fact that much of the plastic is also made from petroleum and simply reducing the number of plastic shopping bags is hardly going to make a difference. Hydro power and electricity has been used for hundreds of years, but now they are worried about the fish and other things impacted. Wind farms have disrupted migratory birds, any thing that people come up with have pros and cons. Since Covid people have not been flying as much and this is causing the global warming to increase because the haze for the airplane emissions has been greatly reduced allowing more solar to make it to the earth, in return we have more fires in western US and people running more AC for cooling. So to make dramatic changes very quickly could cause many more problems short term then they benefit in the long term. A much better way to control energy use or pollution is to control the population.
What I meant to say is, 95% of electricity is used for lighting and all temperature control combined, including refrigeration, water heating, air heating and cooling.
Yes, not only is half electricity lost in transmission, about half is also lost in the conversion of energy type, as a general rule. The one exception is the conversion to the thermal heat, which is 100% efficient regardless of if it is made by combustion or electrical resistance, provided the heat doesn’t go out the window. Now the really big power plants can do a little better than half because it is easier to keep all the energy contained in one place, so with the two conversions of thermal to mechanical rotation and mechanical to electrical, the efficiency is About 37%. If you include the loss from transmission in the lines, it is about 19% efficient.
One could put a windmill at every house and connect the driveshaft directly to the compressor of a geothermal heat pump, and by taking electricity out as the middleman, it would be four times more efficient.