For Saul Griffith, Australia’s clear vitality future is already inside our attain — if solely the fitting individuals would get on board.
As an engineer and inventor, he’s labored in renewable vitality and electrification for the final 30 years, written two books on the subject, and even labored as a local weather advisor with the Biden administration within the USA.
In the previous couple of years, he realised that expertise ‘isn’t the barrier anymore’ to fixing key points linked to local weather change. ‘It’s simply coverage and it’s finance and public training,’ Saul says within the newest episode of TDF Talks.
That is what impressed his mission to ‘electrify every part’ and rewire Australia — however how?
Why electrification is the nearest-term answer to battle local weather change
Saul says our vitality ‘ecosystem’ accounts for about 80 per cent of Australia’s emissions. That’s why we have to ‘rewire’ our vitality economic system round electrification as an alternative of counting on petrol, oil, coal and gasoline to gasoline our vehicles and warmth our houses.
His answer is two-fold: to put money into creating extra renewable vitality, and to switch all the ‘machines’ (together with home equipment and autos) pushed by fossil fuels with electrical options that may be powered by renewables. To make this occur, it could imply getting an electrical sizzling water warmth pump, electrical induction stoves, electrical heating/cooling, shopping for an electrical automobile, a house battery, and putting in rooftop photo voltaic.
How Australian households could make the change
However this doesn’t require you to tear out and exchange your gasoline home equipment with electrical ones straight away. Reasonably Saul says to easily ‘repair it when it fails’, so when your gasoline heater wants changing, that’s time to put in an electrical one. Or whenever you want a brand new automobile, you go for an EV.
He says Australian households are already in a powerful place in the case of creating our personal renewable vitality, due to our delicate climate, sunny local weather, and ‘extraordinary’ uptake of rooftop photo voltaic.
‘I believe we’ve obtained 3 million houses now with photo voltaic,’ Saul provides. ‘Collectively, they’re greater than any photo voltaic plant in Australia. They’re greater than any of our coal vegetation. All our households are already the biggest generator.’ And with some funding from the federal government, electrical autos may present the battery we have to retailer this energy.
An all-electric future may carry huge financial savings
Saul acknowledges the federal government might want to assist fund this transition and the upfront prices, however says that finally, getting off gasoline may save the common family 1000’s a yr.
‘Proper now, you purchase electrical energy, you purchase petrol, you purchase diesel, and you purchase some pure gasoline. However if you happen to change [these] to photo voltaic and electrical… you’re very prone to web $3000 or $4000 a yr in financial savings,’ he says.
He provides our autos contribute probably the most to this determine, revealing that it prices about 20-25 cents per kilometre to drive a petroleum automobile, in comparison with simply 2-10 cents per kilometre to drive an electrical automobile.
Australia’s first all-electric suburb is already underway
In a bid to show this imaginative and prescient right into a actuality, Saul and his workforce at Rewiring Australia launched Electrify 2515: aiming to affect all households in his NSW postcode, and energy the entire space with renewable vitality.
He says the most important problem is that they’re nonetheless awaiting funding for the pilot mission, however it’s going ‘brilliantly’ within the ‘political sense’. Many locally have signed as much as be concerned, and it’s additionally opened up neighbour-to-neighbour conversations in regards to the pathway out of local weather change, whereas Saul says different neighbourhoods round Australia have additionally began to comply with swimsuit.
‘Hopefully we will translate that political momentum into serving to this authorities with actually formidable coverage,’ Saul says.
Observe Saul on Instagram at @dr.electrify, and discover out extra on his work via Rewiring Australia.
This episode of TDF Talks is delivered to you by Momentum Vitality. Take heed to the complete episode under, or discover TDF Talks on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
