Electric machines will solve our climate woes - engineer

If engineers rather than economists had been driving decarbonisation efforts we’d be in better climate shape now, an Australian engineer says.

Inventor and entrepreneur Dr Saul Griffith says to put the brakes on climate change we need to do one thing; electrify everything.

Griffith, an advisor to US President Joe Biden on energy policy, says the transition needn’t be painful.

He says solving climate change should taste at least as good as carrots, at best ice cream, but it should not be painful.

“The tragedy is that the IPCC engaged economists, after the scientists did their work. And the economists squandered a couple of decades in a fight that wasn't terribly useful about letting the free market solve it with a carbon price.”

That was politically divisive and didn’t move the needle in terms of concrete action, Griffith says.

“It's a difference between abstract economic policy and actually thinking about the machines underneath the economy that just make it run. And do we have the technology to replace those machines with other machines that will make it all work out? The answer to that is yes.”

We’ve got a couple of decades to get to net zero and electrification is the way to do it, he says.

“If you think about all the machines in your life, your cars, they last about 20 years, your stoves and kitchen appliances, 12 to 15, your heaters in your house 15 to 20.

“So, we're going to replace all of those machines that burn fossil fuels in the next 20 years anyway.”

It's a matter of making sure we replace every single one of those machines starting tomorrow, he says.

“If your Volvo kicks the bucket tomorrow replace it with an electric Hyundai Kona, if your stove goes out tomorrow that's running on gas with propane, replace it with electric induction.”

We can solve the climate crisis without a significant loss of lifestyle, he says.

“I think we’ll solve climate change with electric jet skis and doing donuts in electric utes. We should brazenly go full frontal against the culture war.

“The denialists and the people that wish to slow us down want to make it feel like it's going to be colder and darker and slower and less interesting.

“But the reality is, all of these electric machines are better than the things you're using today. The electric car accelerates faster, costs one-fifth or less per kilometre to drive, it is quieter, doesn't poison your children and ruin your local air quality.”

The same goes for electrifying kitchens and heating systems, he says.

“If you electrify your kitchen, you're not breathing in things that give your kids and yourself asthma and bronchitis, it lowers the cost of cooking. If you electrify the heating systems in your home there are similar health and economic benefits.”

The challenge is to help people with up-front costs, he says.

“Because we know they're going to save the money over the next 20 years.”

He believes the typical New Zealand lifestyle could be achieved using half the energy it currently does.

“With the same size cars, same-sized homes doing the same things by electrifying all those things.

“That's how much better electrified machinery is than fossil fuels. And given that we've had 50 years trying to change people's behaviour with ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’, we can now look back and say. Well, that didn't work very well.

“I think we need a new approach. And I think the new approach is, we can do this, we can do it quickly, we can do it without compromising your life in huge ways. In fact, it's probably gonna make it better. And we do that through electrification.”

New Zealand has “probably the easiest run at getting to zero emissions of any country in the world because of its hydro,” Griffith says.

He is unconvinced hydrogen is a magic bullet, he tells Jesse Mulligan.

“Hydrogen is electrification, so let's just start there straight up. To make green hydrogen you have to start with green electricity. The challenge for hydrogen is it's a pretty expensive and low efficiency battery.

“So, if you get your wind power or solar power converted into hydrogen, convert it back out of hydrogen, so you can use it to run a car, run a home, you lose about two thirds or three quarters of the electricity you started with.

“If you just use that electricity to drive an electric car and electric home, you get about 90 percent of the electricity.”

New Zealand would need about 250 percent more power to fully electrify, he says.

 “When you electrify everything in New Zealand, you'll need about 250 percent of the electricity you use today. You could meet most of that increase in demand by using rooftop and local community solar, if you converted some of your hydro into pumped hydro, when you've got too much solar and too much wind, you pump the water back up the hill.

“It actually means in New Zealand, you won't need as many batteries to be deployed as in other countries that have less hydro that can be used for storage.”

Cars themselves will become a massive storage battery, he says.

“There's an electric unit in the US called the Rivian. It's about the size of a Toyota Hilux. It comes with two different batteries now. One is 100 kilowatt hours, the other is 180 kilowatt hours, that car alone could run an entire New Zealand household for over a week on its battery.”

Electrifying the economy would also give us a degree of inflation-proofing, he says.

“We have 40-year history of the price of petrol and oil going up every year and 140 year history of the price natural gas going up every year. Right now, it's exacerbated by Putin and Covid supply chain.

“When we invest in households and we electrify them, we stabilize their energy prices 20 years in the future, we lower their energy prices. We just finished a modelling exercise in New Zealand, the average New Zealand household spends more than $6,000 a year on all of their energy today, the majority is on petrol and diesel.

“If we electrified the whole household, they'd only be spending a few $1,000 a year. So, we'd be saving $3000 or $4,000 a year per household in New Zealand.”

 He has been running a community project in Wollongong south of Sydney that bears out the economics of investing in electric, he says.

“In the future when it's all electric that $20 million stays in our community because the majority of that electricity will be generated in our community. And then then you think about how much how far $20 million would go in your average community in terms of new school classrooms, new RSL clubs and surf lifesaving clubs and other community-oriented assets.”

It represents a massive opportunity, he says.

“Think about that investment at a community by community level, this is the most extraordinary opportunity for economic renewal that the world has ever had.”