Grumpy Optimists - The Future of Electricity ⚡️
I did a two week climate gym and here's what I learnt about electricity. What's holding us back from a fully renewable grid and why there is reason to optimistic.
Happy Monday Grumpy Optimists 👋
This week I’m (hello it’s me, George) looking into the role of electricity in tackling climate change, what the future of electricity looks like and why we should be optimistic about the path we’re on. This weeks episode is inspired by a recent Climate Gym sprint (read on to find out what this is), but more on that and how you can get involved later.
⚡️ Electricity
Since the emergence of electrical systems in the late 1800s society has relied on the burning of fossilised plants and animals to keep the lights on, releasing carbon emissions as a by-product. Today, decarbonising the way we create energy is perhaps the most important thing we need to do to reach net zero. This week we’re looking at the challenges we face and look optimistically ahead at the rate of change that is likely to take place over the next 10 years.
Globally we use 23,900 terawatt-hours of electricity every year (a lot), with electricity and heat responsible for 16 billion tonnes of emissions in 2018, equating to 31% of global carbon emissions. However, 73.2% of global emissions come from energy use, all, or most of which can be electrified. For example, the shift from combustion engines to electric, gas boilers to heat pumps and coal to clean renewables. It’s clear that electricity use will increase and our need for low emission energy is critical, but what is stopping us from getting there and what does the future for renewables look like?
The problem with electricity, and more specifically the challenges of clean energy, lies around three core issues:
Storage
With fossil fuels we don’t need to worry too much about energy storage, we simply turn up and down our fossil fuel use at peak hour. But with renewables, it’s not that easy. The wind can’t blow and the sun can’t shine on demand meaning we need a way to store energy for when it’s needed.
Currently, the best technology we have to solve the storage issue is batteries. But batteries don’t come without their challenges, namely the amount of energy they store, their cost and the availability and mining of precious metals required to make them. For example, it’s not possible to electrify some forms of transport - check out this graphic.
Despite the doubts, there is a growing optimism about the rate of innovation in battery storage and renewables more generally. Rethink X, a think tank that analyses innovation believes that disruption of the status quo is inevitable and that in the future electricity will become so abundant it will be given away for free, much like WiFi today (at current prices that seems like a great deal). Whether this is something you believe or not, Rethink X have made bold, unimaginable claims in the past that have very much become true. That’s the power of innovation: it seems impossible until it is done.
Demand
One of the issues relating to storage is in part our use of electricity and demand. Most people within a time-zone use energy at the same time: from 6-9 in the morning for breakfast and showers and then rapidly rising from 5-10 in the evening as people cook dinner, put on the dishwasher, watch TV and perhaps even do their washing. This poses a challenge. As we discussed before, with fossil fuels we can simply burn more fuel to meet demand, but that’s not possible with wind and solar and even with a massive ramp up in storage capacity we’ll need to shift our demand throughout the day.
Okay, but how do we shift demand? Well it’s a combination of behaviour change and most importantly smart, connected devices. For example, for people with an electric vehicle, they come home and plug it in to charge. How about, instead of the car charging when they plug it in, it charges when the demand on the national grid is lower, for example, between midnight and 5am. Even better, could the excess electricity in a car battery power your home while you cook
A lot of these changes rely on smart technology and connectivity with the national grid to understand when a car should be charged, when your washing machine should turn on or what the best time of the day is to heat your water. That’s a future that is likely to happen and in my opinion, is bloody cool.
The challenge will be to make sure that all this technology and the grid can talk to each other. While this may seem like some technologist dream, it’s a reality that is likely to help shift behaviour change and save money. It’s also technology that already exists on a small scale - check out this video from measurable.energy and how they use nudge behaviour to reduce small appliance electricity.
BBC World Service - People Fixing The World, This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
Infrastructure
Okay, so the final, and perhaps one of the biggest challenges we face in decarbonising our electricity, is changing our infrastructure to work with renewables.
Interestingly, while it can take between 1-2 years for a solar plant to be built and operational it can take up to 10 years to expand the grid, threatening net zero plans. The video below from Vox articulates the issues with our grid better than I can with words. Ultimately, we need to shift to a more flexible grid system but that is hard infrastructure that doesn’t make money. While private investors may put billions into solar projects, we need public investment to support those projects. Perhaps the investors should be paying for it too: after all, they will need it.
One project that fills me with optimism is Xlinks, a project that will generate 10.5GW of zero carbon electricity from a 1,500km2 area in the Morocco desert. The project will supply a whopping 8% of Great Britain’s electricity need and hopefully be a catalyst for other major projects around the world. They envision a day where we will share electricity through massive undersea cables in the same way we do we data and internet today.
It’s clear we need to decarbonise our electricity rapidly, but I hope that this piece helped you understand the challenges we face in doing so, beyond building wind and solar capacity. If you’re interested in knowing more about electricity, check out the resources below. If you’re also interested in learning about climate change with motivated peers, check out the Climate Gym!
Electricity Resources
🐢 Tortoise Media - How to power an entire country on a renewable grid.
📹 TED Talks - How to decarbonize the grid and electrify everything.
📉 Drawdown - A summary of electricity and why it’s important.
💥 Want to learn more about climate?
Readers, let me ask you a few questions.
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by how much there is to learn about climate or you just don’t know what to read?
Do you want to join a bunch of people who are also interested in learning more about climate change and sharing knowledge?
Well, that’s where Climate Gym can help you. Climate Gym was started by two fantastic women, Jo and Leone, both based in London and both working in climate. The premise is simple: you have 2 week sprints where you learn about a topic and share back with a group on three short calls spread across the two weeks. It’s bloody good and I can’t recommend it enough.
Climate Gym Group 2 - focusing on Electricity! Meet Jo, Leone, George, AJ and Mary.
The Grumpy Optimists 💚