Energy & Stuff 2 : Plug In!
My new book Plug In! from BlackInc Books just dropped.
My lovely publisher Chris Feik at BlackInc books asked me to write a “How To Manual” for electrification. Initially I wanted to say no, but accepted as I think it is really important to bring actionable climate solutions to street level for the lay-person. I really enjoyed writing “Plug In”, and want to shout out the editor Denise O’Dea who was incredible at editing and shaping the book. It was the best writing collaboration I’ve had with an editor and made the book a pleasing result despite the inevitable deadlines and crunch.
Plug In was written for the Australian market, with an Australian publisher. It reads like lived experience in Australia, because we have cheap rooftop solar energy and low tariffs on high-quality low-cost EVs from China. Australia also has an efficient tradesperson network installing heat pumps and the rest of the electrification kit. I believe my American readers should read it, but it will probably feel like science fiction after the gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act in The Big Beautiful bill. DOGE could have been used to precisely eliminate the regulations that artificially increase the price of climate solutions in the US, but gutted science institutions and climate funding instead.
This book is about the transformative economics of household electrification that documents real examples of families saving thousands by going zero emission. It is a ground level how-to on the 5 purchases to get a house to zero emissions. As I like to say “panic about the emergency of climate change, then make 5 good decisions over the next 10-20 years”. Sadly the book will read like science fiction in the USA.
For economic, technical, environmental, and quality of life reasons electrification is pretty much inevitable — just not so much in the US under the Trump administration. The Big Beautiful Bill is one giant crime against the environment and electrification
It is my fourth book on electrification, and I’m not tired of the topic. Whereas “Electrify” and “The Big Switch” were hypotheticals on how electrification could be both a big win for climate, and “The Wires That Bind” showed it could be a big win for economies — especially local economies — “Plug In” demonstrates that it is now very real in places like Australia and New Zealand.
The book was positively reviewed by a host of outlets including the Canberra times : https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8996489/new-book-releases-plug-in-the-electrification-handbook-and-jacinda-arderns-memoir/
Unfortunately I’ve already started finding a few mistakes — apparently no amount of proof reading innoculates you from that. In one part of the book I mistakenly say that a home fast vehicle charger costs something like $20000 whereas they can now be had for around $500. The more embarrassing mistake is Figure 3.2. It is the most important figure in the book, and a figure and phenomenon I will explore at great length here. Somehow in translating the graph from spreadsheet numbers to a Google Sheets graph to something clean and tidy in Adobe Illustrator I ended up exaggerating the wholesale cost of coal and gas as energy inputs to industry.
Here is the corrected graph (hopefully in the next printing):
As I’ll explore in a future post, for large parts of many economies the economics of electrification is a tail-wind — it saves money at the micro-economic level of the household, and save money and improves productivity at the macro-economic level. This graph is the summary of that phenomenon. It compares the effective cost in $/kWh of actual useful work (like heat or motion or electricity) for all the things we commonly do. This graph is in Australian dollars. (I’ll explore the comparison between OZ and US versions of this data in a future post.)
The graph shows that for all household activities - electricity, heating, hot water, and driving, that the all electric pathway, irrespective of whether you are using grid electricity of rooftop solar, costs less. The cost savings are higher for every kWh you can pull from rooftop solar. The most dramatic difference is the US$1.00/kWh of driving for petrol or gasoline, versus the $0.05/kWh of driving with electricity. 10 times cheaper per mile (or kilometer).
The mistake was in the last two columns — Industrial coal, and Industrial gas. At US$50-100 per ton and US$5-10 per thousand cubic feet, these are effectively 0.25-1c/kWh and 1-2c/kWh when used for industrial heat if you are close to ports and wholesale distribution pipelines. In the published version of the book these were at 2.5-5c and 5-10c. This is extremely important because I think a lot of the toxic politics of climate are because fundamentally industrial coal and gas are still cheaper than industrial electrification of most industrial processes - think the big ones in emissions and energy terms : steel & cement. We need not only cheaper energy to beat this economically we need new processes at lower temperatures.
This also speaks to the strategy we have used at Rewiring (America, Australia, New Zealand) — focus on the areas of the economy where the economics works first to get all important emission reductions now, while we (royal we) work on the industrial solutions. For most economies, the household portion (your vehicles and home) is 30-50% of emissions. Small business and commercial emissions have similar economics to households — favoring electrification — are another 15-25%. For most of most economies the economics work. For industry we still need work.
We got “Electrify Almost Everything” right, but in the US the price of electricity is going up, not down. There are 2 important ways to make it go down in the short term that don’t require technology as much as regulatory reform.
Decrease the cost of, and increase the penetration of, rooftop and community solar.
Increase the utilization of networks (transmission and distribution) but distribution in particular. This is typically the largest component of your electricity bill, so “keeping the wires warm” through higher utilization can make a big difference. This is about sharing electricity and storage in your local community, under the substation.
We made electrifying everything a thing, but forgot to make electricity cheap. This topic I’ll go into far more detail over time. Friend and rooftop solar OG Andrew Birch outlines halving the cost of US solar : https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/cutting-the-cost-of-solar-by-half-with-andrew-birch-of-opensolar-ep263/ I am currently doing an install in Australia on my garage roof (15kW) at around (US)$0.55/W ~ (AUS)$0.90/W. For reference it cost me $5.85/W in San Francisco in 2021, and the US price varies from ~$2.20-3.50 depending on where you live.
The closer you are to the equator the more true this story of inevitable electrification is. But as each year passes and solar and batteries get cheaper, it becomes true further north and further south. I believe where regulatory settings are right, and red-tape is low, the economics work for transportation, residential and commercial sectors from around -38 degrees to +38 degrees of longitude. Again, more on that in a different future post.
Make Electrification Great Again.
Saul.
P.S. I’ve been noodling on geography, solar, local climate, and the economics of electrification, which has me contemplating where the electrification tipping point has been reached as a function of latitude and population density. So I love this site that crunches numbers of American population by latitude. More on this in the future. http://dhmontgomery.com/2018/02/population-latitude/
P.S.P.S. Good congress watching including analysis of what is in “The Big Beautiful Bill” : Congressional Dish.