Marcin Morawski

The case for electrification and solar power

Intro #

This is an excerpt from a tiny newsletter that I used to send to friends when I was intensely learning about climate change. In this issue, I explained why electrifying as many industries as possible will be an important part of the solution.

The only truly sustainable, scalable sources of energy that we have developed are solar, wind, hydro (sometimes bundled together as Water, Wind, Solar (WWS) sources) and biomass. Fortunately, they are more than good enough to power our economy. Unlike their fossil-based equivalents, WWS sources produce electricity directly, and electricity is a much easier form of energy to handle than the energy contained in the chemical bonds of fossil hydrocarbons. Electrical machines also run much more efficiently than ones based on combustion. The result - if we convert every machine to run on electricity, we will need less than half of the energy that we need today. Electrical machines are also generally cleaner (combustion often results in air pollution), quieter, and more controllable. What's not to like?

Until recently, the main problem was that renewable electricity was much more expensive than one made by burning coal. Fortunately, this is no longer the case. In most places around the world, solar and wind are the cheapest new generation technology. Economically, and technologically, nothing is stopping us from running our civilisation on 100% renewable electricity. The only remaining barriers are political - we need to stop subsidising and encouraging fossil fuels.

I link to two excellent books that explain electrification, and the fall in price of renewable solar. Enjoy!

Resources #

Electrify by Griffith - Griffith is the founder of Rewiring America, a non-profit promoting the electrification of America's households. Their agenda is based on Griffith's 2018 mapping of all the energy flows in the US economy, which he summarised in one giant Sankey diagram. This led him to believe that we can make a big dent in our carbon footprint by "electrifying everything". He first summed up his arguments in a talk given to a tiny audience at Stanford. It's a must-watch if you have an hour to spare. This is his key argument:

  1. The way we currently account for non-fossil energy sources is wrong. When estimating the total energy use of a country, we add up all the 'primary' energy resources. Pure electricity is treated as a 'secondary' energy resource, because, in a fossil fuel system, it is produced by burning 'primary' fuels, such as coal and gas. But what about energy sources which produce electricity directly, like hydro or nuclear? Currently, we just assume that their 'primary' input is the amount of coal that would need to be burnt in order to generate an equivalent amount of electricity i.e. we divide the output by the average efficiency of a coal power plant (~38%). So about 10% of US primary energy consumption doesn't actually happen.
  2. We treat renewable electricity differently to fossil fuels. Extraction of oil and gas is treated as useful economic activity, when in reality it's a loss inherent in this mode of production. Currently, about 10% of US energy goes into extracting fossil fuels.
  3. Electric machines are generally more efficient than their fossil counterparts.
  4. So, if we replace all of our machines with electric ones, powered with 100% renewables, we'll need around 40% of the energy that we currently produce. This makes decarbonisation much easier than we think.
  5. However, this replacement needs to happen rapidly. If we follow typical technology adoption curves, it'll be decades before heat pumps and electric cars dominate the market.
  6. Therefore, we need policy which forces people to replace their fossil machines with electric ones. When your gas boiler breaks, it must be more convenient to replace it with a heat pump.

Rewiring America was influential in drafting the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes subsidies that achieve this effect. It'll now be cheaper for many American consumers to buy efficient electric machinery than the alternatives. Of course, there are a number of issues with this approach. For example, can we manufacture all the machines that we need fast enough? The book answers this question, and many others, in a detailed description of why we're not entirely doomed, even if Americans don't change their habits.

To electrify everything, we need to produce a lot of electricity. Solar power will help with that. The book below explains solar's surprising rise to be, in many locations, the cheapest source of energy.

How solar energy became cheap by Nemet - the title says it all. They trace the history of solar power from Becquerel's first observation of the photoelectric effect, to the current ultra-cheap solar production in China. Nemet's answer to the titular question is a 9-point blueprint for making technologies cheaper. I find three points most interesting:

  1. Learning by doing: An accurate prediction of the cost of solar (still working since the 70's!) has been Wright's law - for each doubling of production, the cost of solar drops by 30-40%. To learn by doing, we need someone to pay for the initial few doublings, when the technology is not cost competitive in its target market. For solar, the money came from points 2 and 3.
  2. Robust policy support: Governments, first of the USA, then Japan, then Germany, then China, subsidised solar by creating various demand-pull programmes. Demand pull means that the government guarantees a certain amount of demand for a technology at a certain (above market, but possible to achieve) price, which decreases over time. This causes entrepreneurs to spring up and deliver technology at decreasing prices. The (1975-85) US Block Buy program, for example, resulted in a cost decrease of 85% and module efficiency increase from 5% to 15%
  3. Niche markets: Sometimes, the tide of political economy turns, and the government refuses to support a technology (as the Reagan administration did for solar in the 80's). The solar industry survived lulls because of the ability to sell into niche markets, like solar-powered calculators and navigation buoys.

Nemet also talks a lot about the importance of soft factors, like the idealism of people working in the industry, the importance of sharing knowledge, global mobility of workforce etc. Those are much more difficult to study and quantify, and largely discouraged by our industry built on the profit motive, patents, and violent borders (my addition, Nemet refrains from taking a stance). It's a good book, read chapter 9 if you don't have time for the whole thing.