This week I’m taking a look at the work of Rewiring America, a non-profit working on getting policy makers focussed on the win-win outcomes of electrification. This, of course, is freshly relevant with the greater impetus to get off natural gas in Europe, and indeed Rewiring America have even put out an Electrify for Peace plan, which highlights the cumulative impact of accelerated heat pump installation in Europe and the corresponding opportunity for US manufacturers. Now, I am usually a bit sceptical about decarbonisation plans that rest on the assumption that we mobilise the industrial base like in WW2. However, fresh off the press, Biden is apparently preparing an executive order to invoke the Defence Production Act to build a domestic supply chain for battery minerals and this week was sent a letter by the Electrification Caucus urging an emergency role out of heat pumps and other clean tech to wean the West off Russian energy imports. Remarkable.
What I love about this Rewiring movement is that it is grounded optimistic realism about radical systems change based on adoption of clean technology along current trends, more or less. Despite some rough instruction from the pandemic, our brains are still limited at intuiting the implication of exponential curves - it is pretty hard to get a feel for what 20% compounding in clean technologies does to the energy system over 10-15 years. What it does, as it turns out, is pretty much totally decarbonise the energy system. We just need to keep the pedal to the metal.
As well as checking out the material on the website, I tuned into two podcast episodes with the Rewiring America’s co-founders, this MCJ episode with Alex Laskey and this Watt It Takes episode with Saul Griffiths, which, out of the hundreds of climate podcasts I’ve listen to, was the single most entertaining one yet. Enjoy!
Some of the intellectual ground work for Rewiring America stems from a project that Saul Griffth’s Otherlab did with the DoE to map the whole of the US energy system, source and use of every joule in the economy. A fun (and educational!) way to pass some time is exploring the full map here - http://www.departmentof.energy/
A more legible version with roughly, but not quite, the same data from Lawrence Livermore National Labs here:
One of the most striking things about this chart is that most energy gets wasted (rejected energy), driven in large part by inefficient conversion of chemical energy in fossil fuels into either electricity or kinetic energy (transportation), losing a lot of energy to heat in the process.
The lift for electrification is therefore less than first appears because of this yawning gap between primary and final energy use.
Electrification brings huge benefits. Whilst decarbonisation is often portrayed as a cost, for big chunks of it, it is an economic benefit (even before counting the avoided cost of climate disaster). Rewiring America estimates that electrifying homes would save the average household about $350 on their energy bills (that figure from Rewiring America’s website - Alex Laskey cited higher numbers of around $2500 in the MCJ podcast)
Biggest bottle necks / opportunities:
Local permitting - e.g. rooftop solar in Australia $0.90c / watt installed vs >$3.25 in the US. Materials costs the same, labour costs the same, difference is in permitting, like the difference between major home renovations (requiring a permit) vs plugging in a fridge (no permit)
Workforce - the flip side of all the benefits of the job creation - the challenge of training hundreds of thousands of new skilled labourers, especially in a tight jobs market
Incentives - insufficient subsidies to cover higher capital costs for replacing retiring equipment with electric rather than new fossil - these would be temporary as the manufacturing base gears up and drives down costs, like in EVs as well as renewable energy
Finding leverage points for change: reiterating the point made by Astrid Atkinson in last weeks Notes that, whilst behaviour change is great, individual decision making doesn’t create enough change. Need to focus on large-scale, somewhat rational actors, e.g. utilities, regulators, manufacturers.
Rewiring America was set up to generate a positive political narrative around climate action - not only is it necessary, but it is doable and has inherent benefits.
Some successes coming out of their advocacy work include helping to establish the Electrification Caucus and the introduction of one of its members of the Zero Emissions Home Act, which provides rebates for households replacing fossil heaters, cookers and - get this - clothes driers (I didn’t even know gas-powered clothes driers exist - crazy)
Lesson from Saul Griffith’s experience at Makani, where they sought to capture high-altitude wind power - even though the technology worked, it couldn’t catch up with the cost curve being realised through the deployment of the incumbent technology (traditional wind turbines). [As much as I’m fascinated by new tech, this is a consistent challenge that needs to be overcome - technical superiority needs to be really overwhelming if competing with an entrenched and growing industrial base for deployment of incumbent tech.]
Lastly, Sunfolding, the solar tracking device company that was spun out of Otherlab, has a great origin story, which involves the creation of an inflatable walking elephant. This makes me happy.