Saul Griffith, known to Treehugger readers for his “Electrify Everything” projects, has written “Electrify,” which is “an optimist’s playbook for our clean energy future.” The first sentence says it all: “This book is an action plan to fight for the future. Given our delays in addressing climate change, we must now commit to completely transforming our energy supply and demand—’end-game decarbonization.’ The world has no time left.”
After reading his earlier writing about decarbonization and electrifying everything, I will confess that I approached this book with some skepticism. After all, in his “No Place Like Home” report, it seemed we could have it all: “same–sized homes. Same–sized cars. Same levels of comfort. Just electric.” Just change your furnace and stick solar panels on everything and it will all be fine. Designer Andrew Michler called it “a shopping trip to the Home Depot and, bang, job done.”
In “Electrify,” Griffith is still an optimist, but this is a much more nuanced and sophisticated book. Where previously I thought his solutions to be facile, this book makes it all sound plausible. Right from the start, Griffith tries to convey the urgency of the situation.
Griffith notes, as I have, that we are mired in the 1970s thinking about energy and efficiency, and that the carbon crisis requires a different approach: “The language of sacrifice associated with being ‘green’ is a legacy of 1970s thinking, which was focused on efficiency and conservation.”
One could argue that point; this is what my beloved Passivhaus does. But I cannot argue with his statement that “2020s thinking is not about efficiency; it’s about transformation.”
But what kind of transformation? Here again, Griffith appears to suggest that everything can continue as it has, just running on electricity. Which he suggests is what Americans want.
So forget about public transit or my e-bikes or insulation or behavioral change, it won’t happen. “We need to transform our infrastructure—both individually and collectively—rather than our habits,” notes Griffith.
Griffith does a terrific job of showing the math on everything from hydrogen to biofuels to carbon sequestration, all options being pushed by people who want to keep putting stuff they can sell into your pipes or tanks like they always have. They are all “thermodynamically awful.”
Things are more efficient when they are electric; quads and quads of energy that are rejected as heat and carbon dioxide just disappear and we need far less energy in total. A look at our favorite Sankey chart (2019) from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shows how much is wasted; if everything is electric, Griffith says, then we need about 42% of the energy we are using now. So it is not nearly as big a stretch as one might think.
However, to do all this, Griffith says we need a lot more electricity; three times as much as being generated now. That is a lot of wind, water, solar and a bit of nuclear, but not as much as we think: “To power all of America on solar, for example, would require about 1% of the land area dedicated to solar collection—about the same area we currently dedicate to roads or rooftops.”
Griffith addresses the daily and seasonal cycles with storage of all kinds- batteries, thermal storage, pumped hydro, but also notes that when everything is electric we have less of a problem; cars can store power. Loads can be shifted and balanced. A better-interconnected grid means that if the wind isn’t blowing here, it is probably blowing somewhere else. Even solar power moves as the sun crosses four time zones. He also reminds us that solar and wind are getting so cheap that we can overbuild it, design it for winter, and have more than we need in summer.
And it is such a wonderful world where we can all live just like we do now.
This is where I believe it veers into fantasy and tunnel vision. Changing a heating system doesn’t alone give you comfort; that can come from a variety of factors, especially the building fabric. Changing to electric cars doesn’t deal with a sprawl of dead pedestrians. Mass rail and public transit serve millions that are too old, too young, or too poor to own sporty electric cars, not to mention all those commuters who want to avoid parking congestion issues. And red meat remains a problem, you can’t electrify cows. And none of this accounts for the vast amounts of upfront carbon emissions that come from making all this stuff.
Or maybe it does. In my last post griping about Griffith, I noted that electrifying everything wasn’t enough. And indeed, Griffith veers back into Treehugger territory towards the end. He notes we should use fertilizer more efficiently not just because it takes a quad of energy to make it; we have discussed how that could be done electrically, but because it is polluting. He suggests we should buy less stuff because of the embodied energy in it all, although he never makes the leap to the question of the embodied energy in his electric cars and pickup trucks. He writes like a treehugger here:
He even comes around to suggesting that building extremely efficient new homes to Passivhaus standards is a good idea, and noting that it would be nice if there were “the cultural shifts that make living in smaller, simpler houses more desirable.”
So where my biggest complaint with the electrify everything brigade was that they ignored everything else, Griffith does not. He understands sufficiency, simplicity, and even a bit of efficiency.
The final chapters of the book are worth the price of admission on their own, where he offers “dinner party–ready talking points for the main questions that people will inevitably have for the main argument of the book.” He goes through the litany of problems with carbon capture and storage, natural gas, fracking, geoengineering, hydrogen, and even techno-utopians and magical solutions, which I have previously accused Griffith of being. He even mentions meat.
In the very last section, he even gets into personal responsibility and what we can all do to contribute, including voting the bums out. He advises what everyone can do to effect change, but I particularly liked his advice for designers: “Make electric appliances so beautiful and intuitive that no one would ever buy anything else. Design electric vehicles that redefine transport. Create products that don’t need packaging. Make products that want to be heirlooms.” And for architects: “It means promoting high-efficiency houses, lighter construction methods, and, given that buildings use so many materials, finding ways for the buildings to be net absorbers of CO2 rather than net emitters.”
I really did not expect to like this book. I do not believe we can all live the future we want in suburban houses with solar shingles on the roof charging big batteries in the garage where the electric cars are parked. Griffith does pitch a positive story that perhaps people will buy into, that can be sold to Americans who don’t want to give up “big cars, hamburgers, and the comforts of home.” But the boffo finish, the last chapter, and the appendices tell a much bigger story.
