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Comment by bwood | Hacker News Reader

While on the topic of green energy, I recently started reading Electrify by Saul Griffith [0] which outlines a pretty comprehensive plan for addressing climate change with a broad shift to "electric everything". The summary is that by investing massively in renewables and electrification NOW, it we can solve climate change and also reduce the cost of living for everyone everywhere (not to mention the bonus of not irreversibly altering the climate).

If you are at all concerned about the future of our planet, IMO this is required reading!

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

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I would dearly love to electrify everything, but electricity around here (California) has price growth strongly exceeding inflation while simultaneously getting less reliable. You're economically better off converting electric loads to gas, even if that means using gas to generate electricity.

How much of that is because the approach to power generation has been to try and squeeze more out of the existing infrastructure (gas, nuclear, and hydro) instead of transformation to green alternatives (solar and wind)?

Just as an example, it seems that the Pacific DC and AC Intertie's go through some pretty remote places that could be prime candidates for solar installations.

I will continue to vote against any politician who proclaims wind/solar as the only option a I don't feel they have done any research since they are excluding geo/nuclear sources as well. I refuse to live in a world of constant brown/blackouts and 10X energy costs than we have now.

If energy costs are constantly 10x than now, then it'd be a no brainer to build a lot of new power plants. The problem is that the prices are "artificially" lowered, which of course results in the bad quality of service (bad capacity targets, which directly result in brownouts, but also not enough maintenance on the aging distribution network).

If energy prices were 10x, it'd make sense to invest in energy generating capacity (and lobbying for allowing to build it).

Presumably the solution is to scale up the supply of renewable energy. Another solution is to start making things more energy efficient. There's a lot of untapped efficiency out there.

> There's a lot of untapped efficiency out there.

That's especially true with houses. However, speaking as someone who has renovated their home for extreme efficiency (and now uses 75% less energy than their neighbors) the problem is that the upfront cost of efficiency - both economic and in learning curve - is still very high, at least in the US.

Unless one is willing/able to take on a big and expensive project in home building or renovation, it's hard to make big leaps in efficiency. This is compounded by the reality that the construction industry is very conservative and doesn't like doing things in new ways.

AFAICT, the only "easy" efficiency change that is close to a "no-brainer" is replacing your existing gas or electric water heater with a heat pump water heater, because it generally doesn't require replacement of an entire system, just one appliance.

The other things that make a big difference to efficiency: sealing/insulating building envelopes, installing heat pump HVAC, are much more invasive procedures.

There is a small industry of tools and contractors who specialize in those, but there's not a lot of standards or cost-efficient ways to achieve high efficiency yet. And at least in the US, high home efficiency and comfort are targeted primarily at wealthier people, and the goods/services are priced with that demographic's means in mind. Unfortunately, a few thousand wealthier people with efficient and comfortable homes does nothing for the grid or the climate.

Europe seems much further along in this area, with efficient technology and design being better captured in building codes and off the shelf technologies, and with a focus on energy efficient multi-family buildings.

My baseline electricity rate is $0.29/kWh and my baseline gas rate converts to about $0.06/kWh. Weighted for best-case efficiency that makes the the heat pump water heater 18% more expensive to run than the gas heater. Adding cognitive burden to carefully engineer the water heater's behavior and training my family to change their showering habits to leverage TOU just to maybe-break-even is a bad proposition. Plus, extrapolating the last ten years of rates, I expect electric rates will rise faster than gas rates and make the value proposition worse over time.

Edit: And of course that ignores that I have the condensing gas heater and I don't have the heat pump, so there's capex to cover as well.

It all depends on the efficiency of your existing water heater, and your local electric rates.

I pay the same electric rates as you - $.29/kWh (PG&E). For my family of 4 using 1.024MBTU/month of heat for water, the amount of electricity consumed by the heat pump hot water heater is about 100kWh/month, which works out to or $348/year.

Furthermore, in my area, I have access to a municipal utility program that will pay me $60/year to automatically run my heat pump water heater when renewables are in over-supply, thereby functioning as a kind of capacitor for intermittent renewable supply on the grid, and lowering my water heating electricity cost to around $.25/kWh.

With my previous standard gas water heater (efficiency 65%), I was using 20 therms per month for water heating. At my current local natural gas prices of $2/therm, that would have been $480/year for hot water heating if I kept that equipment. With a condensing natural gas unit at 96% efficiency it would cost $250/year, $90/year less than the heat pump - not a huge difference.

Remember that there are a lot of old standard gas water heaters out there that are only 50-65% efficient. A heat pump water heater is very competitive to replace those.

Natural gas prices also aren't going down, and are far more subject to geo-political supply shocks, as we've seen recently, resulting in winter natural gas rates recently going as high as $2.25/therm. That's a far greater jump than electricity rates vs last year. In places like the Pacific Northwest, or Sacramento CA with clean hydro power, electricity rates are $.09 to $.18/kWh haven't budged much at all. Heat pump water heaters are even better in places like that.

Heat pump water heaters also have the ancillary benefit over natural gas of removing a major source of combustion from within your home/garage, which is better for air quality, and also removes a source of depressurization of your house's air if the water heater is contained within conditioned space.

Oh for sure there's tons of benefits if it can be made to make sense. I'm going to get one as my solar and battery capacity grow. But right now it's unimaginable to do so in PG&E territory where electricity prices rise 4-5x faster than inflation. I'd rather roll the dice on geopolitics for gas pricing.

See slide 16, which already looks quaint just a year or two later. https://autl.assembly.ca.gov/sites/autl.assembly.ca.gov/file...

> See slide 16, which already looks quaint just a year or two later.

That's nothing.

PG&E's natural gas rates have gone up 400% since 2008 (inflation since that time has been about 30%): https://www.pge.com/tariffs/Residential.pdf

The huge jump happened in 2016, and it's stayed high since. The jump reflected increase in natural gas prices and also costs for PG&Es San Bruno pipeline explosion and the resulting higher cost of maintenance of natural gas infrastructure. It was a clear demonstration of the hidden liabilities in old natural gas distribution infrastructure.

It's interesting to note how PG&E's stock price also fared from 2016: https://www.google.com/search?q=pge+stock+price&oq=pge+stock...

which also is when they stopped paying a dividend: https://www.streetinsider.com/dividend_history.php?q=pcg

So we've paid the cost of the gas line upgrade but the cost of the electric upgrade to mitigate the fire risk is still incoming. Therefore we should expect a price shock on electricity in PG&E territory above-and-beyond the large-but-steady increases over the last eight years. And so the yawning gap will get even larger. :(

This is a shame because I strongly prefer electric everything, but not enough to make uneconomic decisions.

> So we've paid the cost of the gas line upgrade but the cost of the electric upgrade to mitigate the fire risk is still incoming.

I don't believe we've paid anywhere near the full cost of upgrading/maintaining the gas infrastructure yet. It continues to age and will require ongoing and increasing maintenance - and expensive maintenance since lines are buried.

Furthermore as more customers switch away from natural gas, the remaining customers rates will rise to pay for the infrastructure maintenance as this paper from the Haas School of Business describes [1]:

"As Figure 4 shows, this percentage rise in bills is small when only a few customers exit the natural gas sector, but bills rise substantially if many customers exit. To understand why this relationship is non-linear, imagine that all customers but one exit, and that remaining customer must cover all of the utility’s legacy costs."

You're right that we will likely pay higher costs for electric infrastructure upgrades also - or alternatively experience more fire-avoidance PSPS events, or a bit of both.

But electricity as a medium for delivering energy offers more technological opportunities for addressing these issues and the very pressing issue of decarbonization than natural gas does going forward. Batteries and municipal microgrids are some of technologies that can help with this going forward.

1. https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP317.pdf

My own plan is to keep growing my solar and battery array until I'm self sufficient. I'll be electrifying as the additional load doesn't generate revenue for PG&E. I expect the last-customer-standing problem you bring up for gas is (to a lesser extent) going to happen for electricity as well.

Honestly my rule of thumb with respect to climate is that private individuals’ pollution pales in comparison to upstream industry. I expect the same is true here as well-residential efficiency is probably small potatoes compared to the efficiency opportunities in industry.

Residential is the single largest sector of electricity consumption in the United States:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/560927/us-retail-electri...

Electricity production represents 25% of GHG emissions in the US:

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Direct residential GHG emissions (i.e. from burning natural gas) are also significant.

In total, residential energy use of all kinds accounts for 20% of US GHG emissions:

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19122

I'm not sure what if anything you're refuting here, because this all seems to support my claim that the biggest opportunities likely lie in industry.

Specifically, your bottom line ("In total, residential energy use of all kinds accounts for 20% of US GHG emissions:") is still considerably less than upstream industry, logistics, etc and especially considering the misleading framing of "US GHG emissions" which don't capture the much larger share of emissions that are outsourced via trade (i.e., America buys a lot of shit from China, India, etc and those countries' industry is even less GHG-efficient than US industry). Note that I don't mean to imply that you intended to mislead.

Maybe we're just agreeing here, and you're throwing out extra context?

> Maybe we're just agreeing here, and you're throwing out extra context?

We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Beyond residential, private consumer choices in general - and importantly the incentives that drive them - have massive effect on upstream industrial and commercial energy uses, far greater than the 20% "residential" piece of the pie.

60% of the "transportation" sector comes from light-duty vehicles [1], which is why electrification of passenger cars is so critical.

And by the same token, we absolutely should look into the GHG footprint of imported goods from overseas or domestically produced. Carbon taxes - phased in, and with rebates to lower income quantiles - are a simple way to handle that.

1. https://www.c2es.org/content/regulating-transportation-secto...

California's "never build anything anywhere" policy makes many things difficult.

That seems like just a different way of saying to stop using fossil fuels, which is true but hard to achieve when the vast majority of our transport is done using them. Electrified public transport taking precedence over cars would accelerate the process but so many people are opposed to public transit.

which is true but hard to achieve when the vast majority of our transport is done using them

Many countries have passed laws to make selling new fossil fuel powered cars illegal within the next couple of decades. You might argue that's too slow, or even not possible, but the intent to reduce reliance on ICE transport and move to electric vehicles is definitely there.

We'll have to see how that pans out - I don't weigh intent very strongly when it comes to averting climate disaster.

Most fossil fuel use is outside of transportation, and within transportation cars and trains are a fairly easy transition. Electrified highways solve the issue for Trucks.

Boats and aircraft are more difficult, but there are a range of viable options for each. For example the US uses a little over 18 billion gallons of aviation fuel a year and produces 17 billion gallons of ethanol per year. It’s not a drop in replacement, but it is much easier than hydrogen or batteries.

Electrifying boats should be easier than cars. It's probably just not that much of a priority because fuel costs are much less relevant.

On a second though, transportation modes tend to fall on a curve where the more relevant are the fuel costs, the harder they are to electrify. Cars and buses are just on a sweet spot of the curve.

You can buy solar powered electrified boats, even with solar they have short ranges and low speeds. Fine for a pleasure trip but not even close to enough for say a tugboat.

The extreme end is icebreakers which actually sometimes use nuclear power because even fossil fuels have energy density issues. Not that we need to replace nuclear icebreakers, but many countries use the non nuclear version, and when you start talking ~100MW * weeks the batteries needed get crazy.

> Electrified highways solve the issue for Trucks.

In principle sure[0], but the devil is in the details with anything like this. You could also solve the intermittency of PV with a planet scale HVDC grid, much cheaper than batteries, but doing so would need a long time just to mine the metal ores out of the ground (someone asked me to do the math, and I did, it’s hiding somewhere in my comment history).

[0] of course Tom Scott did a video about this, in some ways he is the vlogger equivalent of xkcd: https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg

The general solution to intermediacy is excess production. If you assume EV’s win, the batteries needed for that dwarf what you need for a Wind/PV/hydro grid.

Sure, albeit with the exception of a few polar settlements. (IIRC, small thought those are, the required reduction in emissions is such that we do still need to care about them in aggregate).

Indeed, I expect the battery market to grow as fast as the factories can keep up, and for some fossil mining workers to switch to other minerals important for renewable power (not all of them, because we don’t burn the stuff when we’re done so demand ought to be lower when the energy transition is complete).

But the point remains that the details do matter. This stuff may, like code, even remain experimental until it’s obsolete.

It'll play out in the opposite manner. The shift to EVs is going to happen first, followed by public transit. This is because EVs don't have a consensus / coordination problem. Electrifying a line or building a new line takes a minimum of a decade of planning, consultation, design and study, construction. But cars need replacement all the time and you can just go to a website and get an EV. Prices for batteries fall about 30% for every doubling of production. The spread of EVs is exponential, not linear. Sales roughly double every three years and many OEMs have stopped ICE development altogether. Once new car sales are close to 100% EV, existing stock will naturally die off.

Cars will electrify far faster than busses and trains in North America.

All 2300 or so busses in the LA metro fleet will be electrified by 2030 fwiw

Yeah, that's basically the point of the book. Acknowledging that our dependence on fossil fuels is hard to break, but outlining an actually realistic plan for doing so.

I haven't read it and I'm curios what is the gist of the electrification approach. Is it that it's more efficient?

Wouldn't heating and cooling be more efficient if done through architectural approaches?

For example, for cooling Persians use "cooling towers" called Windcatcher[0]. I know that there's a lot that can be done through design both for cooling and heating.

Also, organising the public spaces and infrastructure must be much more productive than aiming for changing the energy conversion systems(i.e. switching away from combustion propellers to electric ones). I' m very sceptical of the idea that electric cars will solve our problems. Just recently Elon Musk demonstrated that electrification of cars and taking the traffic underground simply creates underground traffic congestion[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher [1] https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1479153917749600257

Obviously passive is better, but the point is that you need active heating or cooling or cooking or moving, electric is better. For example, a heat pump space heater or hot water heater is 3 - 5 times more efficient than gas heating.

Electric cars, of course, do share the same issues cars have (extremely space inefficient meaning the throughput of people through over a distance is lower than most other transit options). But the roundtrip efficiency is about three to four times better than a regular ICE (most of the energy goes into producing heat, not locomotion). So they're generally better than ICE cars. You are right that the Boring company seems to have basically solved no problems, and the Vegas system could have hundreds of times more throughput just using light rail (either underground or overground). But the rolling stock of the light rail would be electric - so that better solution would be electrification too!

What about the energy already spent producing and getting your current car to you, the energy spent doing away with said car, the energy spent to produce said eletric car and get it to you? A car represents a lot of potential energy at rest. A lot of power was used to take those atoms of metal or carbon from all over the living earth and reconfigure them into the shape of a car at your present location.

I haven’t seen very many analyses pencil all this out. I’d assume the greenest thing would be to drive your current car for the rest of your life.

Plenty of this research is being done. I know of one a Dutch academic Auke Hoekstra who does a lot of this kind of thing as his main area research.

The average age of vehicles around where I am is 10.6 years, so it is unfair to pretend as if people don’t scrap most vehicles already after 15 or so years. I think a lot of the transition will not be forcing people to replace their cars but just phasing out new ICEs from being sold. The ones that were being driven by those who buy electrics will get sold into the used market and replace older, even less fuel efficient cars that are naturally scrapped.

My understanding around EV production is that it currently takes something like 3 years to cross the total lifecycle energy curve of a conventional car, and then every subsequent year is better for the electric car. Things are improving too as energy grids get greener and battery production gets more efficient.

As I said, cars still have many problems and are a quite large amount of embedded energy and anything we can do to reduce the number of cars around and shift journeys to other modes (walking, cycling, busses, trams, trains) is better again.

It's not really that electricity is more efficient (is IS more efficient in most cases, but a key point of the book is that we can't "efficiency" our way out of the climate crisis). It's that as long as the generation of electricity is clean, the use of it is also clean. We already have clean ways of generating electricity that are cost-competitive with fossil fuels, and by scaling up production it will actually end up massively cheaper than fossil fuels. But there is a high upfront cost to switching, so financing the switch is one of the biggest challenges.

The book is quite thorough in laying out all the challenges (eg, handling variable production from renewables, how to get buy-in from existing fossil fuel stakeholders, etc) and presents realistic solutions for each. I recommend you pick up a copy and read it!

I don't understand why so many make a big deal of the Las Vegas loop congestion. I don't have the impression that it's supposed to demonstrate anything other than that Boring Co could actually dig a tunnel. Presumably they could fix the problem by building a vehicle actually designed for the purpose of a "loop" transportation system, but that's obviously still some ways out. So it's basically a demo, a playground and a marketing gimmick for Boring Co/Tesla.

But surely you would agree that for a company claiming to be revolutionising transport, building a demonstration system that is much worse in most ways than conventional systems is not a very good marketing strategy...?

> I don't understand why so many make a big deal of the Las Vegas loop congestion

Because it demonstrates the exact thing that sceptics said it would happen?

Think a perpetuum mobile company having a demonstration of their machine and it stops. Would you be able to use the excuse that the demo was about showing that they can build machines and not the machine that they promised?

Demonstration that they can dig tunnels? Why would that need a demonstration and even if they wanted to demonstrate it why would they demonstrate it with cars inside and then say that the cars part doesn't count.

Digging tunnels is a very old thing. We know it can be done and we know it works well when you run electric vehicles inside it(All underground systems already run on electric cars), it's just that it doesn't solve congest any differently than the one on the ground. Two cars can't occupy the same volume and it holds both over ground and underground.

Sometimes the difference between Elizabeth Holmes and Mus*k are negligible. She should just failed to kick can down the road for long enough I guess. She should have imitated Mus*k instead of Jobs, then people would have been saying thing like "The tests not producing correct results doesn't mean anything, it's just a demonstration that they can build machines".

Why are you putting an asterisk in Musk?

To prevent fanboys finding it on search flocking. You can't criticise Mus*k on the internet, people will find you abd be very aggressive and annoying.

lol ok

Sure there are many ways to design housing to be more energy efficient, but what about all of the existing housing?

I mean that doesn't sound like a revolutionary hot take to me, I guess I'm glad you're inspired?

The problem we on this side of the pond are facing now is that the electrification is going too fast; people installing solar panels on their roofs, getting an electric car, companies putting solar panels on every building and unused patch of land, people electrifying their house by replacing their gas boilers and stoves with pure electric alternatives is all well and good, but the infrastructure can't handle it, and they need YEARS to upgrade said infrastructure, to the point where they are forced to refuse to connect new businesses (that produce or consume a lot of electricity).

It's great, but it needs big investment in the electricity infrastructure.

And of course, better guarantees for energy production. We're facing an energy crisis over here, due to fuckery with Russia, the gas supplies are running out and prices of gas have gone way up, which is causing electricity prices to go up as well. As a country, you need to be able to give guarantees about the stability, availability and cost of electricity. It's not something fixed overnight.

On the face of it, no, it doesn't sound revolutionary. "Just switch to renewables" is something I've been hearing for 20 years and I never believed it could work until I read this book.

The book is quite thorough in laying out all the challenges (eg, handling variable production from renewables, how to get buy-in from existing fossil fuel stakeholders, how to rearchitect the grid from hub-and-spoke to something more like the internet, how to finance the massive upfront cost in a way that will actually save money, etc) and presents realistic solutions for each.

Please don't take my word for it, just pick up a copy and read it.

Which side of the pound is that?

Because I haven't heard of too many solar panels or electric cars causing any issue anywhere in europe just yet.

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