• We need to triple the amount of electricity delivered in the US. What is required is a moonshot engineering project to deliver a new energy grid with new rules - a grid that operates more like the internet. To do this, I argue we must have ‘grid neutrality’
• Massive electrification with wind turbines, solar cells, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and a much-expanded electrical grid with internet-like neutrality to glue it all together
• No matter how effective climate activists are at convincing people to buy green technology, we are unlikely to decarbonise faster than the natural lifetime of existing machines. That’s why we’ll need incentives such as buy-back programs and subsidies to swap out fossil fuel-burning machines for electric ones as soon as possible
• consumers, utilities and other organisations will require extreme motivation to retire their fossil fuel-dependent infrastructure early because of their sunk costs
• Fixing the climate will require ‘climate loans’ that will make it easier to buy electric cars and electric home-heating units rather than continuing to rely on fossil-fuels powered machines
• The Electric Home and Farm Authority helped rural Americans finance purchases of electric appliances such as refrigerators, ranges, and hot water heathers. EHFA ultimately financed some 4.2M appliances, at a time when there were around 30M households in the US.
• Twenty-first century business juggernauts were built on the commodification of logistics - and we need to do the same for our energy system.
• Much of our understanding of our energy and climate crises is in the wheelhouse of these agencies that were shepherded into existence through three consecutive presidents: Nixon, Ford and Carter.
• Dow was making less money off CFCs in the 1980s, so it started supporting the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs in favour of hydrofluorocarbons, which it had a patent on. Now, in the 2020s, the same story is repeating itself, with chemical companies, such as DuPont, Chemours, and Honeywell, funding the Kigali Amendments, which phase out HFCs, because they have patents on HFOs. They’re also trying to resist deployment of natural refrigerants which are competitors to HFOs.
• The 1970s crisis was an oil imports crisis. It was a supply crisis, since about 10% of America’s energy use - the oil from the Middle East - had been cut off. Since supply must equal demand, experts looked at the demand side - how we used energy - and found that we could easily be 10% more efficient in our use, in particular with our cars and appliances, and thereby eliminate the need to import fuels. Efficiency can solve a problem that relates to 10% of supply.
• The thinking that shaped the 1970s response has left us with a group of people who believe that energy problems can be solved with efficiency on the demand side, and those who think transformation is about creating more supply (whether it be nuclear or natural gas). This has mired us in an old way of thinking that constrains us from seeing the big picture today and the fact that we must transform supply and demand simultaneously.
• These calculations quickly lead to the conclusion that we should electrify almost everything, and because electrical machines are inherently more effective, that we’ll need far less energy on the supply side than you might think. There’s no free lunch here, there’s just a better lunch that we haven’t been eating.
• We won’t solve climate change in time unless we figure out how to retrofit our current homes and dwellings for the electrified future we will live in.
• Around 28% of energy is used in tending our major field crops, whilst another roughly 0.5% is used to grind and crush rocks.
• For data companies like Google and Facebook, energy use is critical to operations and often the biggest expense after payroll.
• The emphasis on efficiency ever since the ‘70s is reasonable, since almost no one can defend outright waste, and almost everyone agrees that recycling, double-glazed windows, more aerodynamic cars, more insulation in our walls, and industrial efficiency will make things better. But while efficiency measures have slowed the growth rate of our energy consumption, they haven’t changed the composition. We need zero-carbon emissions, and, as I often say, you can’t ‘efficiency’ your way to zero.
• America needs to decarbonise supply at the same rate as it decarbonises demand, and that means powering electric machines with zero-carbon electricity.
• People talk about producing hydrogen or synthetic fuels like ammonia or ethanol with properties similar to gasoline or natural gas. Again, it sounds easy, but it requires using more renewably or nuclear-generated electricity to create the fuels than you would need to simply power an electric car straight from the grid.
• Given how hard it is going to be to create all of the electricity we need, it is very difficult to believe that we’ll make 3 or even 5 times as much just for the convenience of having a fuel that was familiar in the 20th century. It would be as if Henry Ford tried to make gas-powered metal horses.
• We need less than half of the primary energy that we think we do, which makes the task of generating it with renewables twice as easy.