Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future

"The subtitle of this book is ‘an optimist’s playbook for our clean energy future’. That’s very accurate: it’s optimistic, and it’s a playbook. It reads a bit like a PowerPoint presentation and I mean that in a good way. It’s very clear, it’s very practical, it’s very possiblist. It’s very much focused on the technical rather than the political without being naive about the need for political will. What are the technical possibilities for addressing climate change? Saul Griffith’s answer is that we already have the most important technical solution in front of us and it’s electrification. Basically, it’s very simple: we have to electrify everything and we have to do it as quickly as possible. He uses the language of the moonshot, that we need an equivalent scale of response to that which the United States mounted during the space race, or, to take another example, during World War Two , or when it was funding the Manhattan Project. It sounds like a lot of investment, but it’s not impossible. It’s possible, it just requires a concerted effort. He’s also very careful to link this to jobs creation. So there are a lot of a win-wins—and even some win-win-wins—in this book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The biggest win is that electricity is a much more efficient source of energy than fossil fuels. A lot of heat is wasted burning coal and gas and oil to turn turbines, so energy is wasted along the way. When we use solar and wind power to generate electricity, there’s a much better conversion of energy into a usable form. The central chapter of the book, which is called “Electrify!”, sets out how we can save 42%—almost half—of the energy we use today by electrifying things. This is partly as a result of the increased efficiency of renewable-generated electricity, but it’s also because electric cars are more efficient than cars with engines. I was also really amazed to see how much energy it costs to actually mine and refine fossil fuels. Apparently 11% of the energy that we use is dedicated to getting fossil fuels out of the ground, so we save a lot just by not trying to mine them. Then we should be doing things like electrifying heating in buildings and using LED lights. The emphasis throughout is on large-scale infrastructure changes as well as large-scale personal changes. He says you shouldn’t be sweating the small stuff. Things like the kind of car you drive, installing solar panels on your house, installing a heat pump, those are one-time decisions that are hugely more consequential than the small decisions we make every day about where we set our thermostat. Another message that he gives is not to worry about efficiency. That’s again a win-win. In the 70s, the response to the energy crisis was to try and make people use less energy and be more efficient. He says we don’t need to do that. If we electrify things, we can have it all: we can have new jobs, clean energy, and copious amounts of it. He’s an engineer who’s also studied information technology. That was one of the things that interested me, that in addition to installing many, many more wind turbines and solar panels on both domestic architecture and on very large scales, we need a new kind of energy grid, that operates a bit like the internet. There’s something called grid neutrality, so that everyone can contribute to and draw from the grid in ways that are equivalent. I think that’s a big part of making it more efficient, both from an energy perspective, but also economically. He brings this perspective on networked systems that he gained as an information technology person to the question of the electrical grid, which is quite unique. Yes, it’s “pull up your socks, you’ve done it before.” It is very US-centered, and he’s got lots of examples of how this has worked in the past. He talks about the establishment of the National Parks and Monuments under Roosevelt, the New Deal, the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, the Civil Rights acts, the founding of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, smoking cessation. We’ve had big challenges in the past, and we’ve risen to meet them. And by ‘we’ he really is saying that we need government level, regulatory support, as well as financial tools. He says that to convert US homes to have the solar panels and heat pumps they’re going to need will cost about $70,000 per home. So, we need financial tools for these kinds of climate interventions equivalent to the mortgages we have for property that will enable households to afford this. To his credit, he’s really good at linking up his technological optimism—that could be almost Silicon Valley boosterism—with his advocacy for massive government support and intervention. He isn’t saying that the marketplace is going to take care of things, even with certain subsidies. He’s saying that we need a generational level of regulatory innovation from the government. In that sense, it’s quite refreshing. Exactly. He’s taking into account the lifetime of the fossil fuel-using objects that we have now. But he’s also quite clear about saying that it has to stop right now. No one can be buying more petrol or diesel cars, and we certainly can’t be building more oil refineries or coal mines. We need to have a scale of solar and wind power that will transform the landscape. He estimates that we’re going to need 15 million acres of solar panels. That’s out of 2.4 billion acres of land in the US, so it’s a tiny percentage, but it’s still a huge area. We’re going to have to learn to live with a very changed landscape, with wind turbines and solar panels all over the place. He says we need to triple current electricity production in the US. These are possible targets and he sets out exactly how we might get there. It’s true. There’s an interesting non-dialogue between these two books. Frankly, I’d rather be in Saul Griffith’s camp because he’s very well informed, and very data driven. He uses a lot of charts to try and bring the reader along with him and says, ‘You can understand this. Once you do, and start tracking things, you can start to see what the low-hanging fruit is in the climate crisis.’ And what he calls clean energy infrastructure—which is essentially electrification—is a real low-hanging fruit. Just as we can go a long way (not all the way) towards saving the fish owls by identifying what they need for their habitat, we can get a long way towards where we need to be by scaling up technologies that we already have. There’s a lot of power in that knowledge if we implement it. Well, the US military uses an ungodly amount of fuel in its jets—at 0.5% it’s a shocking percentage of overall US energy use, especially when you compare it to the 0.7% used transporting children to school or church. That really puts things in perspective. As voters, we do need to be informed so that we can vote in politicians who are likely to pass the kinds of regulations that we need. Over and over the message from people who are working on the front end of climate change—and know better than anyone else the scale of the challenges we face—is how important it is to have hope. Not unfounded hope, but optimism based on smart people working really hard to generate useful data and useful ideas. That’s not to say that there aren’t risks of overreaching the bounds, of overstepping, of unintended consequences. But the risks that we face now from climate change are so great that it’s far past the point of the so-called precautionary principle which has been used in the past to justify inaction."