Ideas on Decarbonizing the Economy
This article is our synopsis of the ideas presented in the 2020 book Rewiring America by Saul Griffith. Griffith tackles the challenge of getting off carbon from the viewpoint of what is technically necessary as well as economically viable. The threshold was “is it ready today and does it work?” While it is a treatise about electrifying everything, it is an interesting perspective for what changes are required for western countries, including Canada. It lends itself to some compact, memorable tasks that we think are worth sharing.
· Every decision that pushes the action off to some future time and some younger person, reduces any chance of success. To hit our climate targets requires almost 100% adoption rate of decarbonized energy solutions starting right away. We lose the battle against climate change one compromise at a time.
· Do all the things we know will work now. Count on the solutions that work today. There are no cost–effective technologies to suck CO2 out of the air. Biofuel won’t meet more than about 10% of our energy needs – for 100% we’d need to burn a quarter of all the biomass that grows on earth every year, which is not going to happen. Hydrogen vehicles use electricity inefficiently - 25% is lost converting it to hydrogen, and another 25% is lost in a fuel cell that converts it back into electricity that drives the wheels. On the demand side, we need a huge roll-out of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and energy storage.
· The invisible hand of markets is definitely not fast enough; it typically takes decades for a new technology to become dominant by market forces alone. A carbon tax isn’t fast enough, either. Market subsidies are not fast enough. The best we can do is early retirement of our heaviest emitters in combination with a mobilization of industry that enables 100% adoption rates.
· We need to eliminate the regulations that artificially increase the price of doing the right thing. We have a legacy of regulations written for a fossil–fueled world. One outcome this has created is that we move more tons of fossil fuels than any of the other things that humanity produces. Less obviously, we need to eliminate the regulations that artificially increase the price of doing the right thing. We need to write simple rules that encourage the best energy system we can build.
· Converting the energy system to low carbon electrification cuts about 60% of the primary energy used today. Generating electricity with renewables would eliminate about 15% of the current primary fossil energy used. (Estimates vary, but wind and solar provide approximately three times higher energy return on investment than fossil fuel power plants.) Savings from thermodynamic efficiency and proper accounting for energy from fossil fuels total around 23%. Powering all road vehicles by non-carbon electricity would save 15%. About 11% of energy is used to discover, mine, refine, and transport fossil fuels. But electrifying everything will still require about 4 times as much electricity as used today.
· In every sector, everything that can be a battery, everything that can shift a load, should. Electrifying all energy demands introduces tremendous load variability. Smoothing out demand will require all of the ingenuity we can muster [Note: this appears to fail his “ready now” criteria]. Interconnectivity is critical, as averaging effects, geographical effects, and the ability to share generation and storage capacities is the only realistic way to get it to all work out. Our waste streams from agriculture, sewage, food waste, and forestry waste represent an energy source that could easily bridge the summer–winter divide if we were to see it as a battery for that purpose. It is a resource equivalent to about 10% of our current energy supply.