Absolutely Electrifying - Ep158: Saul Griffith
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- čas přidán 30. 06. 2024
- Michael chats with Saul Griffith, Australian-born engineer, inventor, advisor, author and 2007 MacArthur "Genius". He specialises in clean and renewable energy technologies, and has founded a dozen technology companies across 20 years in Silicon Valley, as well as authoring 3 books, including `Electrify', and `The Big Switch'. He has recently turned his attention from Otherlab, his independent Research and Development lab, to policy work and writing, including founding Rewiring America and Rewiring Australia, non-partisan organisations dedicated to electrification and decarbonisation and the associated policy and regulatory implications of meeting our climate goals.
Saul received his Ph.D. at MIT in the junction between materials science and information theory. Prior to MIT, he studied in Sydney, Australia and at UC Berkeley in metallurgical engineering.
Links:
Buy Saul's 2022 book Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future: mitpress.mit.edu/978026254504...
Buy Saul's The Big Switch: Australia’s Electric Future: www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Switch-A...
Buy Saul's 2023 extended essay: www.quarterlyessay.com.au/ess...
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I absolutely loved this episode and wondered why I hadn't heard of Saul Griffith. I now am half way through reading 'Electrify: an optimist's playbook for our clean energy future'. Thanks for interviewing Saul - a breath of fresh (unpolluted) air - and now I recognise a Sankey diagram when I see one!
Sankey diagrams rock! I didn’t realise it at the time but I did a very rough equivalent of a sankey for groups of students flowing between different shared houses. I had never heard of sankey at the time.
If you don't do fabric first your heat pump will be much larger, more expensive to buy, install and run than what will be required for your insulated home. The first thing to do is to mandate heat pumos for all new buildings and increase the insulation requirements for new buildings.. Also they should madate solar panels on all new buildings.
A particularly good episode with two excellent communicators on how we navigate the energy transition.
Thanks Mike!
Mikael, great episode. It’s just fantastic to hear two great minds discussing something so obvious as electrifying everything and, how it makes sense. Will have to read his book. Cheers!
great stuff!
I think one of the only meaningful value primary energy measures is X heavy industry needs Y amount of thermal energy for whatever process it needs. Other than that, it's like heat engines just loses 40% to 65% of thermal energy converting that to electricity.
Regarding curtailment compensation - Australian renewable curtailment is not compensated. Developers need to account for 10% to 20% of their energy being worthless.
"How to pay for the WAR" is not a good analogy since a war does not contribute to increase an economy's long-term productivity, but rather destroys its capital stock, besides shifting labor from more productive work to the war effort.
On the other hand, bringing forward future fuel consumption by electrifying means pre-financing an expense that is expected to occur either way; and hence the different macroeconomic / inflationary impacts.
#fabriclast . my own version is the line in the sand, why spend thousands to upgrade the system pipework, insulation, windows, radiators the size of garage doors etc for a little extra heat pump efficiency gain. Too much focus is spent on certain race obtaining the best COP or SCOPs.
This difference could be a 12k system to a 20k system, the running energy saving gain may be only £150 a year, so it would take 30 ish years to get that gain back on having the super efficient version.
Ive always tried to be pragmatic when designing systems, not chasing super results to show off against others.
Installation outlay/distruption and running costs are key, there is a point economics make the decision on where that line in the sand should be.
BTW don't upset my friends Nathan or Mr Webster.
Electric cars still mean a lot of oil production. They all have quite a bit of plastic and their tires. Add to that the fact that they are heavier, which generally means more orocessing, thus more energy, thus more enissions for producing them. That can be contested as ICE cars have way more individual parts, which likely includes more waste and transportation. Still, each car emitts a lot to be made. Considering tbe global goal is 1.5 billion shortly, that is a huge amount of emissions on top of what we currently have. Add to that the fact that increased weight will wear out infrastructure faster and require more overall energy be consumed per distance traveled.
That gets around to another failure in rhe belief tbat EVs will be good us that they will require the road infrastructure be maintained and added to. Roadways all by themselves use tonnes of oil products, are a major source of emissions. What's more, road infrastrucuture has already been proven to siginificantly add to global warming by trapping heat that typically would have been reflected. Temperature differences of up to 10 degrees have been atteibuted to pavement. Add to that the fact that some cities in the world can have up to half their land made up of parking spots for vehicles. This requires all underground services like sewers, storm drainage, electric, cable, phone, etc span far greater distances. This requires more materials and thus more orocessubg emissions, as well as more work to put them in and fix them. More emissions again.
We're at 1.5 right now. Sure, it's probably a temporary peak in temps, but for crying out loud, it isn't far away. We don't think it's too bad yet, but the full effects won't hit us right away. In just the last couple of years has the polar ice caps really began to shrink seriously. The more that happens, the quicker the changes will be evident. Personally, I think the time is over when we can keep thinking we can save the world we live in. The world with the mass consumption of planned obsolescence junk, fhe world where we live in a home in the suburbs and commute some great distance to work in a personal car. A world of the status quo.
Not while we still haven't fixed the single biggest problem we as a society have, the cause of climate change and the reason why no real progress has been made in decades. That is corporations along with the wealthy that own them. For at least four decades now, most oil and gas companies have known about climate change qnd actively been spewing billions of dollars of misinformation to cover it up. When forced to admit it existed, they've fought tooth and nail to prevent being made to reduce production. They lobbied governments. They've facked transitioning, first with carbon capture and now with the Hydrogen economy. Now they are funding extremeist fascist movements in countries all over the world.
No, we've sat there year after year tisking at the oil companies fpr not making enough progress when we should have known thr truth from the beginning.
The can't transition away from fossil fuels. It is literally illegal for them to. Corporations have been designed to be legally obligated to only care about one thing and one thing onlu. Shareholders, which is mainly a small group of the riches people in the world. Any other form of energy is always going to be more expensive than oil with already existing infrastructure. No oil company will be able to stop producing oil while it exists in the planet. Even if the execs stopped it, the directors would fire them. If they directors didn't, the shareholders would sue them. Even if they didn't, some other company would take their place and do it.
Goverments need to acknowledge this and deal with it. They have to tax the carbon at a quickly increasing rate, thus forcing oil producing companies put of business.
Of course, at that point I think the worlds rich would throw a tantrum and punish such countries by boycotting them or raising prices to outrageous rates.
No company will legally take being forced out of bisiness well. They will throw insane amounts of money at PR, media, bribes, lobbies, etc to hurt whoever tries to stop them.
Most likely, to have any serious impact, countries are going to have to take what may seem like extreme action. Just taking over the companies, nationalizing them to keep supplies flowing at an rate suitable for transition. They can wind down opperations as needed.
This would require heavy investment of money that will ultimately get lost. The thing is, for those wanting to count their coins and track investments, the US currently guages climate change by how many billion dollar disasters they get hit by each year. It's only getting worse. With predicted water levels in the future, they are set to lose untold billions if not trillions in infrastructure that will be submerged.
Sp, when tracking costs, what really is the price? How much to build things or how much is going to be forced to be used to rebuild other things.
Alsp, seriously, why is everyone so obsessed wirh electric only solutions. I swear the tunnel vision is insane. Energy comes in many forms and electric is only one of them.
It was mentioned that solar wouldn't be q good splution for heating. Solar electric doesn't fair well in higher latitudes, but solar heat capture does pretty good. Combine it with a sand heat battery and it does better. Solar electric panels can only capture about 18% of light. They say 20%, but that is only pretty much for brand new panels. Solar heat capture is much closer to 100%, meaning that even higher latitude cloudy days will give pretty decent power. There is also heat powered cooling. Designing a structure to utilize warms air's nature to rise to suck cool air into the structure. There are even newer systems that utlize misture absorning materials that give up that moisture when heated to drive even stronger cooling systems.
Not everything requires using electricity.
More changes we will need to likely accept shortly to make the most significant impacts. Public transportation. Also, medium density housing instead of single family homes. Not in all areas. Rural areas will need to insualate and such.
We need to increase the thermal efficiency of homes quickly. A huge amount of our energy and emissions come from heating and cooling. A big problem is, resources. When China started building middle class homes, they ran into significant problems. If you want to build a few hundred million homes with bricks in them, that quatity of bricks would strip all the land in some smaller countries.
Trying to insulate so many homes would take a huge amount of resources. Just to prop up a failing city design pushed on the world by oil and auto industries. For those willing to opt in, houses could be traded for units in buildings. The houses could be dismantled and used as materials for the newer buildings, that way transitioning could save a lot on emssions from extraction and processing. Some materials could be recycled, requiring some processing, but still saving extraction. Salvaged lumber could possibly go towards engineered lumber. That way the new structures wouldn't require nearly as much cement, reducing emissions quite a bit.
It may seem crazy, but it makea a lot of sense. The larger something's volume is compared to it's outer surface, the more thermally efficient it is. Add to that it would be far easier to add heat storage batteries to new buildings, as they could be under it. Plus, larger thermal batteries are far more efficient than a bunch of smaller ones.
Add to that the fact that medium density solves a lot of problems at once. Placing commercial in the builsings as well provides necessities within walking distance. Concentrates areas are far more efficient for public transit than suburban neighborhoods. They require far less underground services.
These aren't one size fits all solutions. They're more of examples of how we tend to allow society to put blinders on us, giving us tunnel vision, when it comes to thinking about solutions. Sometimes bandaid fixes just aren't good enough.
Zzzzzz!
It's burning the oil products that's the problem.
So half your story is wrong.
@@3rdrock not really. Many of push EVs claim it will get rid of oil. Part of my comment shows this isn't true. Also, while the problem with microplastics doesn't affect greenhouse gas in any way we know about, it does show that oil has more problems than just greenhouse emissions. EVs aren't getting rid of those problems.
Also, half is far off from reality. Thr vast majority of emissions from cars doesn't even come from.the cars themselves. It comes from building the cars. Replacing all fossil fuel cars with EVs in a short period of time will actually cause a dramatic increase in emissions rather than a reduction. People will have had to have been driving their EVs for well over a decade before the lack of running emissions will have even come close to offsetting their production emissions.
Plastic, while the oil used to be the plastic isn't going into the atmosphere, doesn't mean plastic doesn't cause emissions. The process of processing the raw oil to separate it into its parts, including the parts that end up as plastic, requires a lot of heat. Oil plants use fossil fuels to create this heat. Since this just requires them to divert a small fraction of what they are processing back to create the heat, it is practically free energy for them. This creates quite a bit of emissions.
Beyond that, EVs require infrastructure. Actually, even more infrastructure, since they are typically much heavier than regular cars. Infrastructure is very emissions intensive for both building and maintaining. I think it was something like 4000 tonnes of greenhouse gases to pave a single mile of road. Something along those lines.
Then the added tire wear.
You get the point. Half the emissions is delusionally generous.