After our carbon-capture blog last week, the universe seems to want to throw big audacious engineering-led climate solutions at our attention span. Here’s another, from the Principal Scientist at Rewiring America, Saul Griffith. Rewiring America is:

a growing nonprofit, working to launch a movement that electrifies everything, starting with our 121 million households. We are motivated by the fact that 90 percent of all emissions in the U.S. are energy related and 42 percent of those energy emissions come from the decisions we make in our homes: how we heat our air and water, cook our food, and dry our clothes, and what kind of cars we drive.

Through accurate, accessible, and actionable data and storytelling tools that power smart, inclusive advocacy and market-transforming partnerships, Rewiring America aims to achieve national emissions goals, improve our health, lower monthly bills, and create millions of clean energy jobs.

What’s their headline policy? In this Medium blog, Griffith makes it really clear: replacing every fossil-fuel burning machine at the end of its life cycle with an electric machine. Or, 1 billion small machines, and 1 million large machines. The case begins as below:

With wildfires in the West, torrential floods in Europe, parched reservoirs, and other dramatic signs that the climate crisis is upon us, we would all like to flip a switch and stop our carbon emissions so that we can save the planet for our children.

But in a world full of fossil-fueled machines (and regulations that support them), it’s hard for many people to imagine the pathway to achieving net-zero emissions in time to keep global heating under 1.5–2.0 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

But that pathway can be simply stated: electrify (almost) everything.

It’s time to demystify decarbonization so that we understand what we need to do to switch our economy from one that relies on fossil fuels to one powered by clean electricity. This requires understanding the machines we use, their energy needs, and how, and how quickly, we can transition those machines to ones that are fueled by renewable energy (predominantly wind and solar).

With the goal of identifying the industrial and economic opportunities associated with achieving net-zero emissions for the U.S., it’s useful to start with a list of the demand-side machines that drive our consumption of fossil fuels, and a list of the electrical infrastructure machines that will enable us to provide modern electric alternatives and substitutes.

The accounting is based on published data sets — Sankey diagrams the Department of Energy and other agencies created in the 1970s to understand energy usage in light of the oil crisis. The Sankey diagrams show how energy from the supply side (those big fossil fuel producers) flows to the demand side (our cars, dryers, heaters, and other small appliances). We can get granular about where our energy comes from and goes, so we know just how much energy we need to replace to fight the climate crisis.

When we do an accounting of where our energy comes from (supply side) and where it goes (demand side), we can see that in order to decarbonize our economy, we must electrify approximately one billion machines.

… Once we understand our energy needs, we can supply them with clean energy — and save over half the primary energy because we don’t have the wasted energy in mining, refining, transporting and burning fossil fuels.

Once you’ve mapped the energy flow, you can look at the machines underneath to understand what and how many fossil fuel-burning machines we need to replace with electric machines powered by renewables.

With my friend and colleague Sam Calisch, we’ve added up these machines to understand how many we must replace at the earliest opportunity — either at the time of failure or retirement — (we can best achieve our climate goals with a 100 percent adoption rate, which means replacing every fossil-fuel burning machine at the end of its life cycle).

All the machines from the supply side to the demand side. We’re used to looking at energy from the supply side, but really when we look at the demand side, what we need to power in our lives, we find that we don’t need as much primary energy as we think we do because of all the energy wasted in finding, digging, refining, transporting, and burning fossil fuels.

All the machines from the supply side (left) to the demand side (right). We’re used to looking at energy from the supply side, but really when we look at the demand side, what we need to power in our lives, we find that we don’t need as much primary energy as we think we do because of all the energy wasted in finding, digging, refining, transporting, and burning fossil fuels. — All the machines from the supply side (left) to the demand side (right).
We’re used to looking at energy from the supply side, but really when we look at the demand side, what we need to power in our lives, we find that we don’t need as much primary energy as we think we do because of all the energy wasted in finding, digging, refining, transporting, and burning fossil fuels.

The tally ends up at 1,063,000,000, which is just a little more than a billion machines. That means that 1 billion machines, or 50 million machines a year for the next 20–25 years, is a first-pass approximation at the task to be completed.

On the supply side, that’s a small number of machines that last about 50 years–machines that produce energy, like oil wells (bad!) or wind turbines (good!). On the demand side, that’s a large number of machines that last about 25 years — machines we use in our homes and businesses, like gas-powered trucks, lawnmowers, heaters, and hot tubs (bad!) or their electric equivalents like EVs, heat pumps, and electric-powered appliances backed by solar and wind (good!). It’s about one million large machines and one billion small ones.

This may sound like a lot, but we already have an extraordinary rate of annual machine sales and production. The U.S. manufactures around 12 million automobiles a year, and with imports included, purchases around 17 million. That’s 340 million vehicles in 20 years. Similarly we purchase around 9 million water heaters a year already. The challenge isn’t about making new machines as much as it is about making sure our machines are electric and powered by renewables or nuclear.

Now let’s get a little more granular, and start looking at where our energy comes from, where it goes, and count all the machines along the way. What are those energy sources, where are all those machines and what are they? Once we know, we can electrify them.

And the piece continues here.

We need to electrify 1 billion small machines, and 1 million big machines, if we want to make a serious dent in energy usage