How does electricity reduce the use of fossil fuels?

Electricity does not inherently reduce the use of fossil fuels -- in fact, the production of electric energy is one of the biggest uses of fossil fuels.

There are two ways that electric power can reduce the use of fossil fuels:

Efficiency improvements, and alternate power sources.

Efficiency improvements:

* By replacing thousands of relatively inefficient fossil-fuel-burning engines with thousands of electric motors and a couple of highly efficient centralized fossil-fuel-burning electric power plants, the same amount of mechanical work requires less fossil fuel.

* By using a microwave oven to cook food rather than a gas or electric conventional oven, only enough energy is used to heat the food itself, rather than heating up the internal structure of the oven and the air it contains, and maintaining that temperature for a longer time.

Alternate power sources:

Power can be produced in several ways that require no fossil fuels -- see the "What can you use instead of fossil fuels?" question below.

Converting those forms of energy to electric power makes it easier to reduce or -- in principle -- eliminate the fossil fuel that otherwise would have been used to produce that electric power.