5 hours Ago By Carolyn Fortuna
Energy plays an increasingly important role in today’s world. Instead of treating electrification as one of many positive goals to move us toward decarbonization, it’s time to see it is essential to all of them — we need to electrify everything quickly. What does it mean to electrify everything? When you electrify everything, you switch how you power your home, vehicles, business, and community away from fossil fuels and to electricity — and, eventually, that electricity will be generated by renewable energy.
It is a very important pathway of global decarbonization — the transition of virtually all building, transportation, and industrial system to electric because electricity is the only rapidly decarbonizing, widely-available, and scalable fuel option. There are many reasons why electrification is a critical decarbonization pathway. Electricity is the only fuel that gets cleaner every year.
Transitioning to electricity will reduce energy demand. Electric costs are lower and more stable. Electricity fosters energy independence.
Health and electrification are unalterable tied together. Lifestyle benefits abound when the move to electrify everything is made. How can the process to electrify everything take place? Individuals can switch any fossil-fuel appliances to ones powered by electricity.
Be forewarned, though: you may need to upgrade your electrical panel. After that, get thee to the heat pump store and swap your gas stove for an induction stove. Look at your yard and landscaping equipment and switch to battery-powered devices.
If you’ve haven’t traded in your internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV), now’s the time. If you have it as a viable option, choose public transport, especially ones that are powered by electricity like trams, subways, and metro rail networks. Click on the image below to download our Electric Home Show guide to electrifying your home! Most retrofits can be done cheaply and easily and without major infrastructural changes! Research solar options available in your region and begin the path to energy independence — you might choose solar on your roof, in a field, or as part of a community solar project.
If you have individual solar, the next step is a personal household battery to store energy when your on-site renewables are not actively producing energy. If solar isn’t possible for you, get an energy provider with 100% renewable electricity or at least a utility with a larger renewable energy mix. Community groups can come together to analyze the physical infrastructure that they share — electrifying buildings, seeking out building retrofits, switching to heat pumps, and adding smart thermostats.
The most significant short-term opportunity to reduce energy consumption and avoid emissions is to invest in energy efficiency. The savings on energy bills typically mean that these investments pay for themselves relatively quickly. Businesses should electrify production equipment, machinery, and transportation fleets.
Yes, building material decarbonization is still in development stages, but trends are opening up for green tech to solve the problem. University of Michigan researchers, for example, make calcium carbonate through an electro-chemical process that captures carbon dioxide from the air and binds it with abundant minerals or recycled concrete. The US Green Building Council (USGBC) has continued to be proactive with their Leadership in Engineering and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program and its scorecard that includes the category, “Materials and Resources.
” The energy transition is good for business. Electrification results in emissions efficiency—we can achieve the same amount of work and meet the same needs with far fewer carbon emissions. Cities need to electrify public transportation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and urban air pollution.
Building codes can preference electric heating and appliances for new construction. Cities can reject natural gas and dedicate themselves to net zero goals within a decade. It’s important to understand that energy poverty does not only occur in rural areas with poor infrastructure — it also takes place in urban low-income households across the world.
Sufficient energy is the prerequisite for residents to meet basic safety and health needs, and families burdened by energy poverty have to deal with high energy expense and low energy efficiency. Energy providers can morph into clean energy distributors through smart grids. They’ll store energy for peak usage while monitoring and analyzing energy use in homes and businesses.
These grids of the future will offer multiple smaller and geographically distributed power sources. Those distributed renewables will have clear connection requirements and guidelines — which will help consumers of all sizes to reduce energy loads during peak periods and send extra electricity back into the grid. The International Energy Agency estimates that meeting national energy and climate targets will require adding or refurbishing more than 80 million kilometers of grids by 2040.
This is the equivalent of the entire existing global grid. Integrating renewables into the electricity grid has seen some of the biggest advancements by combining technologies from different industries. In the process of electrifying everything, we will be creating a networked grid infrastructure where each personal device will not only take energy from the grid but also give energy back.
The collective batteries connected to the grid are what allow operators to smooth out imbalances between energy demand supply. The social cost of carbon calculations that the US Environmental Protection Agency and Canada have harmonized on put the cost around $200 per metric ton of carbon dioxide or equivalent this year. That rises to about $300 per ton in 2030 and almost $400 per ton in 2040.
The European Union gets this too. Its budgetary guidance for European efforts is well aligned with those figures. Want to burn gas in 2040? Expect to pay €144 per MWh in carbon price, according to research by Michael Barnard here at CleanTechnica .
Physicist Saul Griffith explained to Project Regeneration that if we electrify the whole world economy, we will need less than half of the primary energy we currently use. The complete switch from fossil fuels to renewables such as wind and solar will reduce overall energy by 23%. Electrifying transportation will save another 15%.
Eliminating mining and refining of fossil fuels will save 11%. Electrifying buildings will save 6–9%. Removing fossil fuels in the production of our daily materials will save another 4–5%.
At the same time, we need to develop and deploy existing technologies that support the decarbonization of industry, transport and buildings. I feel very fortunate. I live in a condo that has an electric dishwasher, washer/dryer, and HVAC system.
I drive only battery-electric vehicles — I haven’t purchased gas for years. Many communities are offering incentives to move their citizens similarly so electrifying everything becomes the norm. It’s not that rare anymore.
You, too, can make the conscious decision to electrify your life and to empower others in your periphery of influence to do the same. CleanTechnica's Comment Policy LinkedIn WhatsApp Facebook Bluesky Email Reddit.
