Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future

by Saul Griffith

This book doesn’t start with the question of what is politically possible, but asks what is technically necessary to reach a climate solution that is also a great economic pathway for a country.

We need to triple the amount of electricity delivered in the US. What is required is a moonshot engineering project to deliver a new energy grid with new rules—a grid that operates more like the internet. To do this, I argue that we must have “grid neutrality.”

Our future on this planet is in jeopardy. Billionaires may dream of escaping to Mars, but the rest of us . . . we have to stay and fight.

If America does it right, every consumer will save money and the country will create millions of good new jobs and revitalize local economies.

Whatever fossil fuel machinery you own, whether it is as a grid operator, a small business, or a home, that fossil machinery needs to be your last.

We also already have a vaccine for solving climate change. That vaccine is clean-energy infrastructure. We know what that looks like: massive electrification with wind turbines, solar cells, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and a much-expanded electrical grid with internet-like neutrality to glue it all together.

culture moves more slowly than science.

Whether you think climate disasters qualify as an emergency may depend on where you live, how hot it’s getting, and how high the seas are rising around you. My opinion, and the opinion of practically all scientists, is that it is definitely an emergency.

What began as a problem from the past is now an opportunity for the future.

2020s thinking is not about efficiency; it’s about transformation.

End-game decarbonization means electrifying everything. It means that instead of changing our energy supply or demand, we need to transform our infrastructure—both individually and collectively—rather than our habits.

If you sit down with all of the data on the total amount of energy we use in the US, and begin with the thought experiment “what happens if we electrify everything?” some interesting things jump out. This is what I have illustrated in figure 6.1, where you can see that we need less than half of the primary energy that we think we do, which makes the task of generating it with renewables twice as easy.

Under most real-world circumstances, fossil fuel–burning machines are 20–60% efficient.

Carbon-free, non-thermal sources like solar and wind—while also subject to the laws of physics—don’t involve as many conversions from one type of energy to another. Because of this, generating electricity with renewables would eliminate approximately 15% of the primary fossil energy we currently think we need to run the economy.

although solar is typically only 20% efficient, we aren’t losing hard-won energy the way we do in a 20%-efficient car engine.

Same Comfort, Same Conveniences, Half the Energy When we add up all of those savings, we find we only need ~42% of the primary energy we use today. Well, that is pretty remarkable. America can reduce its energy use by more than half by introducing no efficiency measures other than electrification. No thermostats were turned down, no vehicles were downsized, no homes were shrunk. Not only that, but electrification is a “no-regrets” option—we can also deploy other strategies like behavior change and the things we typically call efficiency, and see even further gains. That’s why electrification is the only real strategy for decarbonization—and why it will release us from a paralysis of “what to do?” and provide us with an immune-response to those who seek to confuse the public with stories of the role of fossil fuels in our future.

There is nothing that physically and technologically limits us from doing it all with renewables. There are only cynical or specious arguments that say we can’t. The biggest barriers remaining have the same origin: inertia and the stubborn insistence on the current way of doing things. This manifests as fossil-fuel subsidies and massive misinformation campaigns. It’s also buried in old ways of doing things, like the state-sponsored utility monopoly, which gives low interest rates to big projects instead of to consumers who need to swap their gas heaters for solar and heat pumps.

It is often cheaper to store products than it is to store electricity directly.

Just like the internet, the more connected we are, and the bigger the wires, the better it gets.

These big-ticket items in our households—cars, furnaces, water heaters, stoves, and dryers—along with our decisions about what to fuel them with, drive more than 40% of US emissions today. If we add small business and commercial business decisions around these same things—how we heat our offices and what fuels our company cars use—we are making the choices that create more than 60% of our emissions. This is why we need to understand each of these purchasing decisions as infrastructure. We can make them well and have a huge impact on our emissions. Environmentally concerned citizens today pay a lot of attention to small daily purchasing decisions and make complicated moral calculations about grocery bags, synthetic meat, vacation flights, and plastic packaging. Of course, every little bit counts, but this thinking, as we’ve seen, is mired in the efficiency framework of the 1970s (Reduce! Re-use! Recycle!). These purchasing decisions make a little difference but aren’t ambitious enough to solve our larger carbon problem.

Here are the main purchasing decisions climate-conscious people should worry about: 1. Your personal transportation infrastructure: Everyone’s next car, and every subsequent car, should be electric. (Of course, public transit, bicycles, electric bicycles, electric scooters, or anything that isn’t powered by fossil fuels are even better options.) 2. Your personal electrical infrastructure: Everyone should install solar on their roofs at the next opportunity, whether that be a retrofit, replacing shingles, or when buying or building a new house. You should be installing enough solar to power your electric vehicles and electrified heating systems, not just the small solar systems of today that only accommodate your existing electrical load. 3. Your personal comfort infrastructure (HVAC): Replace furnaces and gas- or oil-fired heating systems with electric heat pumps. Additionally, it is wise to insulate and seal homes. If you are replacing your flooring, it is a perfect time to install radiant hydronic heating systems. Choose efficient air conditioning, and buy systems that allow you to heat and cool only the rooms you are in, instead of the whole building. 4. Infrastructure in your kitchen, laundry and basement: Choose the most efficient and electric refrigerators, dryers, stove-tops, ranges, water heaters, and dish and clothes washers that are available. 5. Your personal storage infrastructure: As the country becomes increasingly electrified, there will come a moment when a...

We have the technology to create a carbon-free future, but can we afford to make the switch? It seems sacrilegious to discuss costs when considering the future of our planet, our species, and the beautiful critters and plants we share the earth with. It’s dismal to have to justify the “economic cost” of doing the things that will make our future better. But I will sharpen my pencil and show you how, in fact, the carbon-free future will save everyone money.

Transitioning to renewables today will require an investment of about $70,000 per American household. The right policies and market scale can reduce this to under $20,000 by 2025. When the US decarbonizes, it will save every household thousands of dollars per year in energy costs.

You don’t fight a war because you can afford it—you fight a war because you can’t afford not to. We can’t afford not to fight the war on climate change.

Even some well-meaning regulations and incentives need to be scrutinized. The early electric-car tax credit of $7,500 was meant to incentivize people to purchase clean-air vehicles and build the electric car industry. Because early EVs were expensive, this looked like a subsidy for the rich. An awful lot of “incentives” are tax deductions or tax breaks. You need to have a pretty high income before you can take full advantage of them. As we move into our decarbonized future, it is worth remembering that we don’t win unless we all win, and designing regulations and incentives that work for everyone is critical.

I wish that decarbonizing for the sake of having a better planet to live on would be enough incentive to get it done.

In the 1950s and 1960s, America went from a majority six-day work week to a five-day work week. The productivity improvements that came from automation after the Industrial Revolution were sufficient to give most Americans more leisure.

We need to change the unhealthy narrative that saving the earth is going to cost us money. It won’t. If we do it right, we all stand to reap the benefits and save money—and have longer weekends!

The world produces close to 90 billion bullets every year. That’s more than the number of LEGOs produced annually—around 20 billion. What a damning statistic about humanity!

If more of the earth were covered in snow, more light would be reflected into space, and we would slow or reverse global warming—this is why losing the glaciers and Arctic ice is a terrible idea, because reflective snow is replaced with light-absorbing water or stone.)

The fossil-fuel industry is happy to promote the hydrogen fiction because the majority of hydrogen sold today is actually a byproduct of the natural-gas industry. Only a tiny amount of gaseous hydrogen exists naturally on earth. To make and store carbon-free hydrogen, we would first have to create electricity to power a chemical process called electrolysis, which is not highly efficient. Then we’d have to capture the hydrogen gas and compress it, which consumes about 10–15% more energy. Then we’d have to decompress the gas and burn it or put it through a fuel cell. We lose more energy at every step of this process.

Hydrogen will be useful, but it is not the answer.