I. A Hopeful Engineer’s Vision for a Rapid Energy Transition
Saul Griffith is smart, ambitious, and passionately committed to advancing the global decarbonization effort. He holds a Masters and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his studies focused on the intersection of materials science and information theory. Throughout his career, Griffith has aggressively applied his abilities and educational training to advance clean energy innovation. He is the founder Otherlab, which has attracted tens of millions of dollars of research grant funding—much of it related to sustainable energy technologies. For instance, one company he helped to found builds pressurized air systems that facilitate more cost-efficient solar panel installations on uneven land. Griffith also cofounded Makani Power, a company focused on developing airborne wind turbine technologies that Google acquired in 2013. And more recently he cofounded Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on the nation’s electrification effort. Electrify is a natural outgrowth of this work and of his years spent helping the U.S. Department of Energy evaluate potential ways of improving the efficiency of the nation’s electricity system. Griffith has authored a similar book describing pathways to electrification in his birth country of Australia as well.
A palpable sense of urgency pervades Electrify, almost as though its readers are an integral part of Griffith’s latest fast-moving startup company whose signature project must not fail. Griffith himself compares his decarbonization vision to the mobilization efforts and investments made during World War II, asserting that decarbonization could actually be comparatively easier and less expensive than continued reliance on fossil fuels. In a similar vein, he states that his proposed “climate loan” program to help finance electrification has “clear historical precedent” in the federal loan programs introduced in the 1930s to help pull the country out of the Great Depression. Throughout the book, Griffith emphasizes that it is possible and necessary to decarbonize now, dismissing calls to allow natural gas to serve as a transition fuel or to continue waiting for safe and affordable nuclear energy technologies to mature.
For better or worse, Griffith is an engineer rather than a lawyer—a fact that is evident at various points throughout Electrify. In the book, Griffith leverages his scientific training and entrepreneurial mindset to lay out a general engineer’s blueprint for accelerating electrification across the country. The book supports this vision with an abundance of statistical facts about everything from the useful lifespan of a typical water heater to the average weight of a solar panel. Griffith’s stated goal of this numbers-heavy approach—which proves effective at multiple points throughout—is to arm readers so that their “entreaties to politicians may be detailed” and more convincing.
Unfortunately, Griffith’s status as a number-crunching nonlawyer also leads him to consciously overlook many political obstacles to the energy transition—a significant omission given the outsized impacts of those constraints. A self-proclaimed optimist, Griffith argues in the book’s Preface that “[a]ll too many people in climate advocacy or climate work are beginning with the question of ‘what is politically possible’” and are thereby hampering progress. Regrettably, Griffith never explains how the “viable path to averting the climate crisis” laid out in his book is reachable without major policy changes that most incumbent energy industry stakeholders are likely to oppose. Griffith acknowledges that advancing his vision for the U.S. energy system will require “policymakers . . . to rewrite the federal, state, and local rules and regulations that were created for the fossil-fueled world”—a transformation that has been hindered by political opposition for decades. He also rightly observes at one point that to tackle climate change we “need a narrative that is . . . more honest about the task at hand.” For those very reasons, the book—as valuable as it is—might have been more impactful if it had more directly confronted the climate movement’s thorny political and legal headwinds. In fairness, Griffith likely recognized that those issues fell outside his area of expertise and thus opted to defer to others to tackle them—a perfectly sensible approach.
II. A Rebuttal to Climate Policy Naysayers
Published in an era of rampant disinformation about the potential costs of climate change mitigation, Electrify offers a data-supported, upbeat vision of a low-carbon society and how we could achieve it with minimal discomfort. A core message of the book is that contrary to what U.S. fossil fuel industry advocates and allies sometimes suggest, dramatically reducing our coal, oil, and gas consumption is possible without major disruptions to how we eat, play, and work. In fact, electrifying the U.S. economy and weaning the nation from fossil fuels could ultimately bring great benefits for most Americans.
Griffith assures readers that an electrified America is a better America—one that is healthier, more affordable, and more fun. He insists that the clean energy transition will not require us to “make do with less, but it actually means that we can have better things.” In that spirit, he urges readers to embrace the mindset that “if we build the right infrastructure, right away, the future will be awesome.” Electrifying our homes and cars could ultimately leave more money in our pockets and also reduce our vulnerability to fuel price spikes—an upside that has taken on new value after the recent gasoline and natural gas price volatility from the Ukraine-Russia war. In Griffith’s mind, though, the potential rewards of electrification go well beyond that:
Our cars can be sportier when they are electric. Household air quality will improve, as will public health, since gas stoves raise the risk of asthma and respiratory illnesses. [And] [w]e don’t need to switch to mass rail and public transit, nor mandate changing the settings on consumers’ thermostats, nor ask all red meat-loving Americans to turn vegetarian. . . . There is no need to fear this future, and there will be cost savings and health benefits if we embrace it . . . .
By backing up his assurances with hard facts, Griffith offers a powerful rebuttal to the fossil fuel industry’s often-negative messaging about how decarbonization will impact ordinary citizens.
Griffith’s optimistic arguments about the feasibility of an electrified low-carbon economy extend all the way up the energy supply chain. He points out that merely replacing coal- or gas-fired power plants with wind and solar projects would reduce the amount of energy needed to fuel the U.S. economy by nearly twenty-five percent because thermal electric generating facilities that rely on steam to turn turbines waste lots of energy as lost heat. Transitioning the country’s fleet of gas-powered automobiles into one of electronic vehicles will similarly cut huge amounts of wasted heat out of the nation’s transportation sector, thereby reducing the sector’s total energy demand without any reductions in miles traveled. Electrification would likewise eliminate the need to expend large amounts of energy extracting and refining fossil fuels, resulting in even more energy conservation. These upstream efficiency savings would reduce carbon emissions without requiring major changes in Americans’ daily lives.
III. Compelling Diagrams
Another valuable feature of Electrify is its abundance of informative diagrams that visually convey important concepts. Griffith masterfully uses graphical depictions to strengthen his message at multiple points in the book. He uses a block diagram in the book’s first chapter to powerfully illustrate the outsized impact of fossil fuel combustion on the nation’s total carbon dioxide emissions. The Sankey flow diagrams or “spaghetti charts” appearing in Chapter 4 provide a wealth of digestible information and perspective on how energy from a variety of sources powers various discrete sectors of the U.S. economy. The Chapter 7 diagram comparing the potential land footprints of wind and solar energy development to those of various types of existing land uses is immensely valuable for those seeking to refute land footprint arguments against renewables. And Griffith’s charts in Chapter 15, depicting how U.S. fossil fuel production and electric generation are divided among the nation’s red and blue states, effectively support his claims about how political polarization that has slowed the sustainable energy movement could be mitigated if more Republican-leaning states recognized the economic growth potential in their wind and solar resources.
IV. Some Quibbles
Although Electrify is a recommendable read for those interested in pathways to electrification and its potential benefits, a few elements of the book stood out through my critical law professor’s lens. As is typical in law journal book reviews, I describe some of those shortcomings here. I do so cautiously, however, and hope my critiques do not overshadow my genuine appreciation for this insightful and well-written book.
One minor aspect of the book is its suggestion that laws and policy programs aimed at accelerating electrification are a novel policy strategy when, in reality, such approaches have been widely advocated for more than a decade. In the first line of the book’s Preface, Griffith proclaims that the book’s “electrify everything” strategy for decarbonization “approach[es] the climate emergency from a new angle.” In actuality, scientists and scholars have been prescribing and advocating for electrification of vehicles and buildings for several years.
To distinguish the book’s approach from previous ones, Griffith also imprecisely caricatures the 1970s as an era when the predominant belief was that it was possible to fully decarbonize the U.S economy through energy efficiency and conservation efforts alone. At one point, the book declares: “It’s not the 1970s anymore, and we’re not facing a ‘70s energy problem that can be solved with energy efficiency.” Such rhetoric not only miscasts 1970s beliefs about the limits of energy efficiency and conservation efforts at the household and end-user level; it also downplays the strong arguments for additional investments in such measures today.
Griffith’s dismissiveness toward energy efficiency and conservation efforts may have been motivated in part by his desire to emphasize that electrification could deliver so many efficiency benefits that it might spare Americans from having to change their energy consumption habits. The book claims that post-scale-up “clean energy will basically be ‘too cheap to meter,’” implying that focusing policy programs on saving and conserving energy may not ultimately be worth the effort. The utility-level efficiency benefits of electrification Griffith highlights surely will be substantial, but discounting the value of end users’ efficiency and conservation efforts on that basis seems unnecessary and sends a potentially counterproductive message. Many untapped cost-effective efficiency and conservation strategies remain available in relatively short order, and implementing the low-hanging fruit among those strategies would likely do much to accelerate progress toward decarbonization. Ideally, the book could have acknowledged the benefits of these strategies and encouraged readers to promote them alongside electrification efforts—especially since, as Griffith concedes, electrification will require dramatic increases in the nation’s electric generating capacity.
The book is likewise surprisingly dismissive of green hydrogen technologies as an important ancillary tool in the decarbonization toolkit. Griffith calls hydrogen a “false god,” asserting that at best it “will only end up being a niche player” in carbon-free economies. In reality, it increasingly seems likely that green hydrogen could be immensely valuable in helping to fully decarbonize the country. Because wind and solar are intermittent resources, vast amounts of energy storage capacity will be needed to facilitate full electrification. Chemical battery technologies are quickly advancing and becoming more cost-competitive and will surely play a critical role in supplying shorter-term energy storage. However, the electricity system will also need seasonal energy storage capacity to keep the lights on during prolonged periods when fewer wind and solar resources are available and hydrogen has emerged as one promising means of filling that need. And although Griffith disparages hydrogen vehicle technologies as a “canonical case” of “silliness,” the truth is that many countries are investing heavily in them and these technologies could ultimately have a significant place in the nation’s carbon-free transportation system as well.
V. On the Whole, a Persuasive Read
Despite its imperfections, Electrify is a valuable additional resource for those working to advance decarbonization in the United States. Griffith’s futuristic vision for the U.S. energy sector and the facts and figures he uses to support it are a much-needed reminder that a low-carbon sustainable energy system is increasingly within reach and will be worth the transition cost. Written for a layperson audience, the book is a modern thought leader’s call to action—a not-so-subtle recruiting tool for assembling the brigade of private and public actors needed to accelerate the energy transition.
As technology and policy innovation continue to charge forward, the prospects for the electrified and decarbonized energy system championed in the book only grow. For instance, Griffith rightly notes that “soft costs” for U.S. rooftop solar installations are still much higher than they are in some other counties and further reducing those costs alone could sharply increase the pace of distributed solar development. Emerging solar project designs such as agrivoltaics and floatovoltaics could also enable millions of additional acres of U.S. land and water areas to host solar arrays while simultaneously bolstering food and water supplies. And Congress’ recent ten-year extension of federal wind and solar tax credit programs, expanded rebates for electric vehicles, and billions of dollars in other federal clean energy-focused investments through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provide a potent shot in the arm for the nation’s decarbonization movement.
Decades from now, Electrify may well serve as a revealing snapshot in time—a historical glimpse of our country as it stood on the precipice of a transformational shift in how it sourced and used energy. Future Americans will ultimately determine the extent to which the book’s ambitious ideas become reality. Hopefully, subsequent generations will be able to look back fondly upon this book as one of countless stepping stones in a successful transition to a cleaner and more sustainable America.
