Electrify, An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future by Saul Griffith
Recommendation
You may feel hopeless in the face of ever more dire predictions about the effects of rising global temperatures and catastrophic climate change. At the same time, many people fear that aiming for a carbon-free future means unpleasant changes in lifestyle. Engineer, entrepreneur and innovator Saul Griffith lays out a realistic – albeit ambitious – plan for a zero-carbon future that doesn’t require radical lifestyle changes, yet reduces living costs, creates a more cooperative society and protects the beautiful Earth.
Take-Aways
- Only immediate radical changes can avert a climate catastrophe.
- Implementing the changes required might seem impossible – but history proves it can be done.
- Replacing fossil fuel energy with electricity means rethinking the entire system of energy supply and demand.
- Moving to a fully electrified future will allow people to maintain their current lifestyle and conveniences at a lower cost.
- To meet the demands of full electrification, the United States must more than triple the amount of electricity it produces currently.
- Having electricity available 24/7 all year round requires building a neutral, interconnected infrastructure.
- For the electrified future to work, every household needs an individual infrastructure – and the government must help with financing.
- An electrified future requires a thorough overhaul of current regulations.
- Addressing the environmental crisis requires a change in how things are made.
Electrify Book Summary
Only immediate radical changes can avert a climate catastrophe.
If people want to stop global warming, they must take radical action now. Even if the global temperature rises by only 2?C/3.6?F, it will have devastating effects, resulting in rising water levels, flash floods, wildfires, droughts, loss of many animal species and increasing global instability. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found in 2018 that limiting the global temperature rise to a maximum of 2?C/3.6?F depended on immediate, comprehensive, never-before-seen changes within the next 12 years. The panel’s findings relied on the use of negative emissions technologies – those that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere – which are neither cost-effective nor available on a workable scale.
“It’s now time for end-game decarbonization, which means never producing or purchasing machines or technologies that rely on burning fossil fuels ever again.”
Humanity has wasted too much time. If people had started to work toward this goal in 2000, they could have reached the target by reducing emissions by 4% per year. In contrast, starting in 2021 means that people must reduce emissions by around 10% per year. To achieve this, people must commit to a “100% adoption rate” – meaning that humanity must replace every machine, power plant and appliance that currently runs on fossil fuels with a decarbonized equivalent when it reaches the end of its useful life.
Implementing the changes required might seem impossible – but history proves it can be done.
Averting climate disaster might seem impossible when looking at the changes required. However, history records similar successful large-scale efforts.
“We can look at past challenges to understand the tools we can use from history to help fight our climate crisis.”
For example, in the early 20th century, naturalist John Muir petitioned President Roosevelt to preserve the American wilderness. His efforts led to the creation of five national parks, more than 50 bird sanctuaries, wildlife refuges and 150 national forests. After the Great Depression, the United States implemented extensive programs to help Americans get back on their feet, including government-backed home mortgages and low-interest loans.
During World War II, the United States ramped up its industrial capabilities to help the Allied forces win the war – it went from having only 1,700 military aircraft and no bombers to having around 300,000 aircraft, 18,500 bombers, more than 100 aircraft carriers, many thousands of battleships, submarines, tanks and guns, and millions of machine guns within only three years. And during the space race, the United States created science agencies and invested $150 billion in today’s dollars over 10 years to get a man on the moon; by contrast, current spending on energy and climate technologies stands at around $3 billion.
Replacing fossil fuel energy with electricity means rethinking the entire system of energy supply and demand.
An oil shortage caused the energy crisis of the 1970s. The United States tackled the crisis by encouraging people to embrace more efficient energy usage, thus focusing only on demand. To make total electrification a reality, people must consider both demand and supply.
“We need to know where our energy is currently being supplied and used so that we can substitute cleaner sources of energy, and cleaner end uses of energy, to get a carbon-free future.”
People, government and institutions must examine all their energy needs and consider how those needs can connect to zero-carbon energy sources and how that will change the amount of energy those needs require. Data about the energy usage of different sectors reveals compelling insights: For example, the majority of the US government’s energy use fuels jets that fly around the world in support of military operations. In residential homes, half of energy use goes to heating. The transportation and industry sectors are the largest consumers of energy. In industry, an increasing amount of energy goes to data centers and storing digital assets. In transportation, highway travel uses 10 times more energy than air travel. In addition, transporting fossil fuels demands significant amounts of energy.
Moving to a fully electrified future will allow people to maintain their current lifestyle and conveniences at a lower cost.
Generating electricity from fossil fuels involves burning them to produce heat, which turns to steam, which then spins turbines to create electricity. This process means that fossil fuel machines are only between 20% to 60% efficient.
“America can reduce its energy use by more than half by introducing no efficiency measures other than electrification.”
Using renewable energy sources such as solar or wind requires fewer conversions: Solar panels work by sun rays hitting a semiconductor and directly releasing an electron, which means no energy is lost in transforming one form of energy into another. Moving to fully electrified transportation would save around 15% of energy, as gas-powered vehicles are quite inefficient at converting fossil fuels into usable energy. Humanity can garner similar savings by no longer searching for, mining and transporting fossil fuels, and by electrifying buildings and manufacturing facilities. Adding up all these savings demonstrates that people could continue their current lifestyles and conveniences using less than 50% of the energy they consume today.
To meet the demands of full electrification, the United States must more than triple the amount of electricity it produces currently.
Electrifying everything requires a large ramp-up of electricity production. Carbon-free energy sources such as solar, wind and nuclear can more than meet this demand. Nuclear energy is problematic for a number of reasons: It isn’t renewable; and cooling its power plants requires a lot of water, which leads to rising water temperatures. While it would be unwise to build more nuclear power plants, nuclear power can assist with the process of moving to a fully electrified society.
“There is nothing that physically and technologically limits us from doing it all with renewables.”
Wind and solar power require land, yet powering the entire United States by solar would only require using only 1% of its land area. Rooftops, parking spaces and commercial buildings could all feature solar panels; agricultural land can double as wind turbine sites.
Having electricity available 24/7 all year round requires building a neutral, interconnected infrastructure.
One of the biggest obstacles to moving to fully renewable energy sources is that they don’t produce the same amount of energy at all times or during all seasons. The solution to this problem is storing energy and changing people’s habits of energy consumption. Storage requires batteries, but not only batteries in the traditional sense. Anything that stores energy can serve as a potential battery, from electric cars to hot water heaters to fridges and heaters to ventilation and air conditioning systems.
“We need a grid that treats everyone connected to it as both a supply and a demand, a load shifter and a battery.”
Mechanical batteries – such as pumped hydro, flywheels, compressed air or hydrogen – can serve as energy storage sites. These can help even out the daily or medium-term supply. Biofuels such as wood or waste from agriculture, food and forestry can assist with seasonal demand variations. Also, the more things get electrified and connected to the grid, the easier it will become to balance supply and demand. The end goal is a decentralized electrical network in which people’s vehicles and appliances form aspects of the larger infrastructure.
Behavior changes are also necessary – and this is nothing new. For example, many people set timers for pool pumps or hot water heaters to turn on when electricity is cheaper. When all the houses on a street connect to a grid network, they can coordinate demand load for items that don’t need to be on at a particular time during the day. The larger the grid and the better the long-distance transmission infrastructure, the less the supply will vary.
For the electrified future to work, every household needs an individual infrastructure – and the government must help with financing.
To contribute positively to a zero-carbon future, people must embrace zero-carbon transportation, install solar panels, replace gas- or oil-fired heating systems with electric heat pumps, insulate their homes, choose energy-efficient appliances, install battery storage, advocate for renewable energy use in their communities, and eat less meat. People must also accept that their personal infrastructure will become part of a shared, large-scale infrastructure.
“We need to fundamentally rethink our infrastructure so that doing the right thing is baked into the world we inhabit.”
Because everyone’s personal infrastructure will contribute to the zero-carbon target, the government should provide financing options that make these up-front investments universally accessible. Governments can enable this financing through low-interest climate loans. In exchange, governments will reap the benefits by connecting people’s personal infrastructure into the national grid, which will allow the grid to balance supply.
An electrified future requires a thorough overhaul of current regulations.
Currently, many existing regulations around buildings, state utilities and federal financing impede efforts to go carbon-free.
In Australia, for example, to protect the national car industry, the government put a high import and luxury vehicle tax on cars imported from abroad. This led to electric vehicles (EVs) becoming prohibitively expensive. In contrast, Norway offered incentives for its car market to produce cheap EVs, and now 60% of new cars sold there are electric. In Australia, rooftop solar costs $1/W. In the United States, the costs are three times as high due to regulations, permissions, inspections, political opposition and high sales costs.
“One front line in the fight to fix our climate lies with the hundreds of little regulatory barriers preventing the future we need.”
Another problem is fossil-fuel subsidies: in the United States, for example, the oil industry can deduct the value of oil still in the ground from its taxes, listing it as capital equipment at 15% per barrel. Also, the government has never raised the deposits it required before oil companies could drill for oil above the $10,000 limit set in the 1950s. Utilities and private households need to receive the same payment for any electricity they feed into the grid. Currently, consumers get paid the wholesale rate rather than the consumer rate.
Addressing the environmental crisis requires a change in how things are made.
Most products have a carbon footprint, or “embodied energy.” The amount of embodied energy varies depending on what energy source a product utilizes. In addition, the lifetime of a product – or the number of times it is used – also reduces its environmental impact. Producing longer-lasting products makes them more sustainable and reduces overall energy usage. For example, around 50% of a car’s carbon emissions occur during production. In another example, cement causes 8% of global emissions, and half of those occur during production. Similarly, glass, while recyclable, requires a lot of energy to produce.
“Rethinking industry for a decarbonized world is one of the most exciting challenges for the industrialist coming of age today.”
Many renewable technologies rely on rare-earth materials; efficiently recycling these materials is crucially important to a zero-carbon future. Governments should invest heavily in research into alternatives to these rare materials, as well as finding alternatives to widely used materials such as plastic.
About the Author
Inventor, entrepreneur and engineer Saul Griffith founded Rewiring America and Otherlab.