I suppose so... They wouldn't make a power plant with a WHOLE bunch of excess power handling capabilities when they primarily need to meet the needs what is getting power from them. If we were running at 250VAC then power stations would probably still have the same wattage handling.
a 1500W heater is 1500W at 120 or 240V, but my point is if the US were to rise to 240V at an outlet, people would get rid of 1500W kettles and heaters and replace them with 3kW ones like in Europe. After all, water boils faster in a 3kW heater. After a few years most similar high load appliances would be replaxced with higher wattage ones, and thus the overall load would increase. I guess we just have different problems here. In the US you need air conditioning. We don't. But when 10 million kettles switch on in an advert break, I'm sure it must put a similar strain on our national grid!
Well look at that, even I didn't know that! You must be the oldest Belgian on these boards, I welcome thee! If you trace back my coordinates, you can see I'm a Belgian too! ConKbot of Doom: Yeah, we have square cables, they're way supperior to your inferior round cables, because ours are stackable!
There's also a significant saving in copper metal in house wiring. The 2.5mm2 we use for 13A sockets is about half the price of 6mm2 cooker cable. On 110v we'd need about 5mm2 for sockets.
