Image from petovarga on Shutterstock.
[This article was originally published in Yale Environment 360. ]
For a long time, the dialogue on climate solutions has been dominated by the supplier’s view of the energy system: what will replace coal-fired power plants? Will natural gas become a transition fuel? Can the hydrogen energy industry develop? These are important questions, but crucially, they missed half of the equation. We must put the demand side of the energy system at the core of the climate debate.
The demand side is where people, families, and voters live. This is where we use machines every day, and the choice of which machines we use-whether driven by fossil fuels or electricity-to personalize our climate action and climate solutions. We don't have many choices on the supply side, but we have all the choices on the demand side. In most cases, we decide what to drive, how to heat water, what to heat our home, what to cook food, what to dry clothes, and even what to mow. This constitutes our "personal infrastructure", and the exchange infrastructure will become a key driver of the global transition from fossil fuels to green energy.
According to the analysis of Rewiring America, I co-founded a non-profit think tank focused on electrifying our lives. If we remap the emission map around family activities, we will find that approximately 42% of emissions come from our surroundings. Decisions made in life. Kitchen table. If we include the offices, buildings, and vehicles related to the business sector and the decisions we make on our desks, the proportion is close to 65%.
The climate challenge on the supply side is the issue of a relatively small number of giant machines, including coal mines, liquefied natural gas terminals, pipelines, refineries, and natural gas and coal-fired power plants, all of which are owned by companies. The climate challenge on the demand side involves a large number of relatively small machines. In the United States, it is our 280 million cars and trucks, 70 million fossil fuel furnaces, 60 million fossil fuel water heaters, 20 million gas dryers, and 50 million gas stoves, ovens and stoves.
The traditional storyline of what we can do in our own lives is the "efficiency first" narrative produced by the oil crisis of the 1970s. During that time, we needed to adapt to the reduction in foreign oil supplies, which resulted in more efficient cars, better fuel consumption, and more efficient electrical appliances. This gave us efficiency as a policy, such as the vehicle fuel standards mandated by the federal government, and led to ENERGY STAR equipment.
But now we are facing a completely different kind of energy crisis. In order to solve the problem of global warming in time to keep the earth livable, we need to achieve zero emissions as soon as possible. Obviously, we cannot "improve" our zero-emission approach, we need to transform our approach to no-emissions. Starting from the demand side, this leads to a clear conclusion: we must electrify everything. And quickly. We must provide clean power generation on the demand side for all these new motors on the supply side.
too fast? Roughly at the speed at which we replace these things. The car can usually be used for about 20 years. The average service life of water heaters is 12 to 15 years; furnaces and home heating solutions, about 20; kitchen and laundry equipment, 10 to 15 years. The best climate result we can achieve is to upgrade all these demand-side machines to higher performance motors during the next retirement. This needs to be combined with increasing the power supply to power these machines, using clean renewable energy, and eliminating coal-fired power plants and other heavy emitters ahead of schedule.
For nearly 20 years, I have been talking publicly about climate change and what solutions are needed. This is a learning journey about how to tell a story to inspire people to face things that seem insurmountable. I worry that nihilism will soon catch us on this issue unless we can portray success. The picture needs to be simple, achievable and actionable steps. People want to see themselves in the solution, but they don't want to sacrifice the things they love and the convenience of modern life.
Without completely changing the structure of daily life, it is still possible for us to control global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. This may not be the version that everyone thinks is a successful climate, but it can help avoid extreme warming by replacing the machines in our lives. For this reason, we need to make the adoption rate of the correct technology close to 100% when replacing the fossil fuel machines used today.
Fortunately, most of these things have technology. Electric vehicles currently have enough cruising range, and the cost parity at the dealership is close enough, we can imagine this shift. The cost per mile has also dropped significantly. Air source heat pumps now have such high performance that they defeat traditional furnaces and boilers in many climates. The modern induction cooking experience is better than gas cooking. It is not true that rooftop solar is the cheapest energy source in the United States, but it is true in Australia. The difference lies in regulations.
The solar modules themselves are very cheap, about 30 cents per watt. Australia has launched a certification and training program to build a workforce and also certifies installers as inspectors. This makes the process of buying and installing solar energy in Australia simple and feasible within a few days. The installation cost will ultimately be about $1 per watt. In the United States, the process takes 60 days and includes complex permit and inspection requirements. The result is that the installation cost ends up at $3 per watt. We need to look around the world to find best practices and implement them everywhere; Norway’s rapid adoption of electric vehicles is another example.
If you can cover the solar energy of the average US roof at the installation price of Australia, you can put two electric cars in the driveway as easily as in California or Norway, install the best Japanese heat pump and do it on the best German induction cooktop Fan-Then use the home battery connected to the smart main panel to support all this. The battery is connected to a heuristic grid to encourage consumers to generate electricity and store and transfer the load on their own-we are still a long way from the success we need To go.
In the United States, 121 million households across the country need to replace and install 1 billion such machines. This creates a huge economic opportunity for manufacturing all or most of these machines in the United States. And because the cost of all these things is further decreasing, and the performance is improving year by year, by around 2025, people will save money by making these choices for the infrastructure of daily life.
Solar energy for suburban houses. Jeremy Bezanger's photo on Unsplash.
It is not a complete solution to climate change, but it is the solution for most of them, and it is a solution that we can start to deploy anywhere today. Yes, in a few years we will need government subsidies and incentives, such as those proposed by Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM) in his zero-emission housing bill that are currently included in President Joe Biden’s Those in the "Rebuild Better" plan were debated in Washington-this needs to be fully funded. Heinrich’s bill and fellows in the House of Representatives will offer point-of-sale discounts for heat pump water heaters, heat pump HVAC systems, electric cookers and electric clothes dryers. The goal is to remove the early obstacles for homeowners to replace fossil fuel equipment with cleaner alternatives.
According to the Household Savings Report for Rewiring America, in the long run, electrifying our lives will save everyone a lot of energy costs—up to $2,500 per household. But these clean energy equipment require higher upfront costs to achieve savings over time. This means that we will need low-cost financing.
Low-interest "climate loans" will enable everyone to afford the upfront costs of these clean technologies. Different families have different financing needs, so we need to pull every policy lever at the federal and state levels, and participate in public-private cooperation to achieve this goal. If banks intervene, the role of the government will be to ensure that all households can afford it. For many families, making these investments while making a home mortgage is very simple. For other households, federal policies already exist that enable people to pay as they use their utility bills and have upgraded appliances in the long run. When people buy new appliances and machines, they need to provide these incentives and mechanisms.
Critics will argue that this will encounter political obstacles. It will. But if we are still subject to what we think are politically feasible, then we will never have a climate agenda that is ambitious enough. We must change politics. Only when every family feels economic benefits, will politics change and become a two-party cooperation. Rooftop solar no longer has political significance in Australia, because households of all political parties have felt the positive impact of cheap electricity on cash flow. Ford F-150 is a cultural symbol and the highest production car in history. The importance of electrification is self-evident. Once the red, blue and purple families enjoy the lower cost of ownership of the electric F-150, the politics of the whole issue will change. Norwegians from all walks of life support the country's rapid adoption of electric vehicles, which is no longer a political issue. Politicians will still be able to speak about the fear of change and loss around this transition in 2021. This is becoming increasingly impossible because the economy will change.
This required electrification will halve the total amount of energy needed by the economy, but the amount of electricity that needs to be transported will triple. Obviously, it is crucial to cleanly generate this kind of electricity. 10% to 30% can be generated locally on rooftops, commercial buildings and parking lots. The rest will need to be produced by wind farms, utility-scale solar farms, and geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear facilities. All these facilities need to be connected by long-distance transmission lines.
Of course, all of this is not simple and politically not easy, but as time goes by, the inevitability of this kind of solution becomes stronger and stronger, and the cost competitiveness becomes stronger and stronger. Season, our motivation to fight the climate will increase. The only question is whether our sense of urgency will grow fast enough to alleviate the climate disaster before it is too late. My optimism stems from the fact that the scale of the transformation has reduced costs, enough to make the transformation an economic dunk, which will significantly change politics.
The long-term economic benefits of household electrification are not only reflected in energy conservation, but also in the creation of employment opportunities. According to the analysis of Rewiring the United States, as the country's energy infrastructure modernizes, large-scale electrification in the United States will create as many as 25 million new jobs — across every zip code. Most of these tasks — installing solar panels and wind turbines, upgrading the grid, and replacing dirty heaters with clean ones — must be local. You cannot outsource clean energy. You cannot install induction stoves offshore. These jobs will have a multiplier effect, because women who find a good job solar installer spend money in the local community.
At the same time, we should stop pretending that there will be other miraculous technologies that will change the rules of the game. Most solutions will be electrification. In the final analysis, hydrogen and nuclear energy are also electric power technologies.
When the Wartime Production Committee prioritizes Liberty ships, Liberator bombers, jeeps, and ammunition, all-electrified drives will require the kind of attention the United States had in World War II. This time, it will replace bullets with batteries, airplanes with wind turbines, and tanks with electric cars.
Once we turn to clean energy, we will find that we will be able to enjoy all the comfortable homes we are used to — warm and cool, lively cars, hot water, radiant heat — but with lower cost and cleaner air.
This is a critical moment, but if we act wisely, it can also have a major impact on the economy, our family and the environment. We still have one last chance to tackle climate change: to electrify everything.
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