The electrification of households, powered by renewables, can halve energy use, fire up the economy and cut our living costs.
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Inventor and entrepreneur Saul Griffith: If Australia did all the
things we do every day with clean electricity, instead of fossil
fuels, we would use less than half the energy.
Leigh Vogel
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Author
Saul Griffith
grew up in Sydney and studied engineering at the University of New
South Wales. He earned his PhD at MIT and moved to Silicon Valley,
California, where he started a series of technology companies. He is
the founder of Rewiring Australia and Rewiring America, two non-profit
organisations focused on electrification to address climate change.
The Big Switch: Australia’s Electric Future
by Saul Griffith will be available from February 14.
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The electrification of almost everything, powered by renewables, can do the heavy lifting, immediately.
This is the pathway that offers the cheapest, fastest way to eliminate the most emissions. Australia is uniquely placed to light this path up for the world.
The next federal government could pilot the electrification of a suburb or town, funding hundreds of households to go fully solar and electric, a world first.
Australians love solar. We do it cheaper and better than anyone. Our continent has extraordinary renewable resources and low population density.
Renewable energy demands a lot of space. The Australian lifestyle, fully electrified, requires about 4000W of constant power per person, or 35,000 kWh per person per year.
Aside from Australia, only Canada, Kazakhstan and Mongolia could provide that lifestyle using only renewable energy, while dedicating less than 1 per cent of their land to the task.
Although those colder nations would likely struggle (compared to Australia) due to a shortage of year-round sunshine.
By contrast, China and India would have to commit 10 per cent of all of their land area to renewables. That’s not going to happen. So nuclear energy and some efficiency and lifestyle changes have to remain on the table.
But for Australia – the sunniest, windiest continent – we have unique potential to benefit from the global energy transition, including making energy-intensive things like steel, for those crowded countries.
Envy of the world
If Australia did all the things we do every day with clean electricity, instead of fossil fuels, we would use less than half the energy.
Some motivated, typically wealthy, households have already realised this. They install rooftop solar, run electric vehicles, cook with induction, use electric heat-pump water heaters and heat-pump space heating for winter. They probably also have a battery so are watching energy bills plummet.
Currently, if you can afford the upfront cost the pathway to zero emissions is obvious and lowers the monthly energy bills.
The challenge is extending this to everyone. For the past two decades, the price of the electrification kit has fallen rapidly, by around 20 per cent every time the industry doubles in size.
Australian rooftop solar, the envy of the world, is a great example. After financing, it generates electricity at 5-7¢/kWh, about a quarter the cost the local distribution network can provide. Solar will likely halve in price again as it permeates the world.
In time, it will shift from being the cheapest delivered source of energy to nearly free. Similarly, the price of electric vehicles has dropped so far that in 2022 Ford will deliver the F-150 Lightning whose enormous battery will cost half (per kWh) of home batteries in Australia – and come with a free truck.
All of this points to a fundamental shift that must occur in our climate change thinking: we will solve this problem through abundance, not scarcity.
Model the falling capital cost of home electrification, and you will see that this year many more Australian families could substantially benefit from all-electric lifestyles.
By 2024, this recipe will save nearly every Australian home money.
By 2030, on current cost reduction trends, you can predict that all 11 million Australian homes will be saving about $5000 a year on their costs of energy and vehicles.
Green steel
Macquarie Bank and the Commonwealth Bank now offer explicit finance products to make these things affordable.
Innovative energy companies, some born in Australia, are already offering incredible financing packages with their services that include helping with the headaches of installation. The future is here, it’s just not quite affordable to everyone yet.
If Australia builds towards a 2025 national roll-out through pilot programs, we can strip out unnecessary costs to make electrification a shovel-ready national project. Yes, there will be a cost – but it will pale compared to the costs avoided.
The average household now sends $2500 a year overseas for someone else’s oil. That is $30 billion a year lost from our communities.
Rewiring our homes, by contrast, will demand a massive expansion of work for tradies installing solar and batteries, wiring up heat-pumps and putting vehicle chargers in place.
These jobs cannot be outsourced because they are physically tethered to a community. This would seriously stimulate the suburbs and regions.
What about the other solutions that governments love to fund?
Biofuels are not plentiful enough. To provide all the world’s people their current energy using fuels made from biological material would require burning every living thing on the planet once a year.
Biofuels will prove useful for aviation and freight, along with some heavy industry and heavy machinery. But that’s probably about all.
Australia undoubtedly has a big role to play in hydrogen, but it is unlikely to fuel many cars and its role in steelmaking is far from certain.
There will be some end-industries that need hydrogen, like ammonia for agriculture, but it will not provide a large part of the world’s energy supply. Even 20 per cent is very bullish. A more likely figure is around 5 per cent.
Carbon sequestration has a small contribution to make, by burying CO2 in soils – a slow process. But it’s unlikely we can sequester as much carbon as is already modelled into the IPCC’s two best-case scenarios of 1.5 and 1.9 degrees. Which means we’ll need to do even more electrification, even faster.
Some will argue Australia should stick to its traditional strengths in primary industry and mineral exports. But this is to overlook our extraordinary birthright of abundant renewable energy – far exceeding our needs.
Australia is actually the logical place to become the world’s foundry. Between one-third and half the cost of steel and aluminium production is energy to refine it from ore. If we can produce the world’s cheapest electricity and use it to refine ore into metal we will have a fundamental price advantage over the rest of the world.
It is a strange fantasy to send more expensive hydrogen overseas to turn our red dirt into steel when the metal would be cheaper produced locally. If we converted all Australian iron ore into steel it would be an $800 billion industry, 10 times the size of our exports today.
That scenario may be unlikely, but we can certainly have far more primary processing powered by cheap renewables.
Australia is among the top five producers and reserves for all the critical elements of the global energy transition: steel, aluminium, lithium, copper, zinc, nickel, rare earth elements, even uranium. And while Australia doesn’t need nuclear to power our domestic economy, many other economies will want our uranium.
If Australia commits to the path of electrification we can decarbonise our domestic economy this decade, while buying ourselves time to decarbonise our export economy in the next decade.
We should be creating the next 10 companies in green steel, green ammonia, green aluminium, green copper, green lithium … you get the point.
The winner of the next election should be a party that recognises we won’t win this abundant future if only the wealthiest households can participate and politicians drag their knuckles on the policy front.
Links
- Can this inventor and entrepreneur make Australia the world's first fully-electrified, fully-renewable energy economy?
- Electric Monaros and hotted-up skateboards : the ‘genius’ who wants to electrify our world
- Saul Griffith says Wollongong is a key part of his vision for an electrified Australia
- Climate change solution could come from 'electrifying everything', Australian inventor Saul Griffith says
- Nine policies to transform Australia – pv magazine Australia
- How do we win the culture war and turn the tide on electrification? Better call Saul
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