Electrify
by Saul Griffith · first published 2021
10mentions
4recommended by
9HN commenters
2022–2026first – last mentioned
44% recommend56% neutral
"Saul Griffith lays out an accessible, rigorously-researched plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy in time to address climate change. His plan, in short, is to "electrify everything." Griffith uses his deep understanding of U.S. energy flows, materials, and clean energy technologies to show that decarbonizing in time to meet climate goals is not only possible, but can be done without major sacrifices in our lifestyles, creating more jobs and a cleaner, healthier environment. Unlike many books in the climate space, Griffith's Electrify is optimistic, drawing on historical precedents to show that
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That's a big takeaway I got from the book Electrify by Saul Griffith (a really good read). The book only really looks at US carbon emissions, but a substantial chunk of emissions comes from refining and transporting petroleum projects -- these are emissions…
on “Europe Makes Shipping Vessels Pay for Carbon Emissions” ↗> Hell, eleven percent of the energy that America currently uses, according to Saul Griffith’s excellent book Electrify, simply goes to finding more energy. That's a pretty shocking stat too! The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal…
on “Forty percent of the world’s shipping consists of fossil fuels to be burned” ↗Electrify by Saul Griffith's is an up to date survey of where we are. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify
on “Ask HN: Book recommendations for renewable energy and climate change?” ↗…true. Plastic has a huge carbon footprint because huge amounts of greenhouse gases, in particular nitrous oxide, are emitted by the process of manufacturing it. (Source: Saul Griffith's excellent book Electrify, which cites this report: https://www.ciel.org/plasticandclimate/)
on “Our biggest ever river catch?” ↗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…
on “India's richest man pouring $80B into green energy, including new ventures” ↗…Austrialian solar prices, article from Jan. 2023. https://www.canstarblue.com.au/solar/solar-installation-cost... According to google Australian dollar is $0.66 US Dollar [2] https://www.amazon.com/Electrify-Optimists-Playbook-Energy-F...
on “Solar Power Bails Out Texas Grid During Major Heat Wave” ↗…increase efficiency (in insulation, appliances, food production, transportation) as a means to curb CO2 emissions and slow climate change - all very important. Lately I've been reading Saul Griffith's book "Electrify" which proposes a different tack - "simply" electrify all energy usage and let people maintain their current lifestyles exactly. Interestingly, doing so would reduce total US energy consumption[0] to…
on “Climate change won’t wait for future innovation – we need action now” ↗One issue in this calculation is that you'd need to increase the amount of electricity generated to replace heating and other work done by fossil fuels. From Saul Griffith's book Electrify, "Electrifying everything will require three to four times as much electricity." [0]. 490 * 3 = 1470TWh capacity, or I guess about three 100W light bulbs per day? [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify
on “Solar Power/Batteries are 60% of planned new U.S. electric generation capacity” ↗…of the other half is wheat and food. A not-so-surprising revelation from a close study of the Sankey diagram: our fossil-fuel supply chain is itself a major consumer of fossil fuels." (Saul Griffith, Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future)
on “The energy historian who says rapid decarbonization is a fantasy” ↗…router rewires the electricity infrastructure of the planet, energy expert Saul Griffith references it in the names of his organisations Rewire America and Rewire Australia, his youtube lectures, his books Electrify, Plug in and the Big Switch. Amory Lovins references it in his books and talks and Eben Moglen in two of his talks. It is a bunch of chips in a network of conductors (metal cables) and optical fiber…
on “Has electricity decoupled from gas prices in Germany?” ↗