Someone on this website blasted and downvoted me a few weeks ago for stating that moving everything we have that consumes energy to electricity will cause power crunches in "first world" countries.
Why are we putting all of our eggs in one basket?
Why are we putting all of our eggs in one basket?
Electrification is like just-in-time logistics for energy. It is significantly more efficient to power your cars and stoves and everything else from sources that are generating power at scale, but it makes you massively more fragile (and out of control since you have little recourse against and no oversight over the large entities that control the energy.) It's a great abstraction of energy if you can count on all the power you need, when you need it.
It's much worse than the case of logistics because every part of generating, distributing, and pricing electricity is controlled either by political processes that shift with the wind or government-sanctioned monopolies. And the projects are often huge and slow moving.
Electricity can be produced pretty efficiently from almost any sources. Whilst it has a lead time, that lead time is measured in years to build power generation, rather than decades in replacing peoples devices and the transportation infrastructure.
Alternatives are almost always much less flexible, and are a much bigger danger of getting caught out by a volatile market.
AFAIK because there is no other basket (hydrogen, the more promising, is far behind electricity, mainly because it is difficult to distribute and store).
Untrue. Energy losses in hydrogen storage and transmission are significant (11%) but much smaller than the losses at the electrolysis step (24%) and the redox step (46%).
1/ Losses vary according to the way the hydrogen is produced then used, and there are multiples paths. Overview: https://assets.siemens-energy.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:53...
Moreover there are ways enabling a very high yield, for example high-temperature electrolysis (some recent gas turbines can be fed with a gas-hydrogen mix, up to 100% hydrogen)
2/ This is about green hydrogen ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_hydrogen ), therefore the electrolysis step is done thanks to electricity over-produced by renewable sources (without burning any combustible no producing any waste). Consequently the total cost of those losses are very low, as not using this overproduced electricity would lead to lose 100% of it.
I specifically omitted gas stove, not sure air pollution is the reason for that one.