Green Builder Sustainability Symposium Presentation – Slides & Transcript

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

In mid-2023, Green Builder Media’s CEO Sara Gutterman reached out to me to see if I were interested in presenting at their annual Sustainability Symposium. It’s been running annually for close to a decade, and with COVID it transitioned to virtual and won’t be going back. That event occurred a couple of weeks ago, and I was privileged to present my optimistic perspective on the transformation between RMI CEO Jon Creyts and Jeremy Rifkin, author and advisor to governments on multiple continents. Over a thousand participants were online for the virtual event. The following is the lightly edited transcript of my remarks and the question and answer opportunity.

For those who like videos and talk talk, here’s the YouTube.

Thank you for the wonderful introduction, and thank you, Jon, for the overview of the excellent work that RMI has done and continues to do. I have more future-oriented stuff. You’ll see a lot of themes out of Jon and RMI’s excellent work that will be projected forward into the future. Our low carbon future is coming fast, and it’s coming amazingly quickly, and it’s very spiky. I look for pockets of the future, and the pockets of the future are very broad.

I like to start with this. It’s not as bad an eye chart as some, but this is a Sankey diagram of energy in the United States for 2022. What it says is, here’s all the energy that comes in on the left hand side into the United States economy. This is extrapolatable to every economy. The energy goes through electrical generation, goes into residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation and use cases and comes out here.

The reason this is important is because of this big gray box up here on the right, rejected energy. Rejected energy is the energy that comes in out of primary energy, which Jon mentioned, but we don’t actually get any use out of it. That’s because virtually all this stuff down here in the lower left, the petroleum, the coal, and the natural gas., when we burn it for energy, that’s a very inefficient process. We throw away a lot of the energy as waste heat, and we actually make a lot more carbon dioxide.

This is why we’ve got a problem today as we consider those energy pathways. One of the ways I like to describe fossil fuels is that when we burn them, they create CO2 and waste heat. And, oh, by the way, some useful work for us. That’s something that’s going to change.

As we look by comparison at those low carbon forms of generation up in the upper left hand corner — solar, nuclear, hydro, wind, and geothermal — there’s a lot less rejected energy. We don’t actually have to replace all of the energy on the left, we just have to build out the much more efficient pathways, drive them through electricity, and electrify all these end points, and we get to radically lower energy requirements for the same economic and comfort values for a society.

I’ve done the math on this. I do napkin math on enormous numbers of subjects, which is part of the reason I’m privileged to be here today with Jon and with Jeremy Rifkin, who follows me. But other people have done really deep math on this, like Mark Z. Jacobson and team out of Stanford. They are the ones who are responsible for the projections of 100% renewables by 2050. A very credible scenario, imperfect in some ways, as are all of mine, and I’ll share mine, but they’ve done the same math. And under 50% of the primary energy coming into the United States is actually required when we move to renewables and when we move to electrified energy services. Saul Griffiths also did that work, and he calculates that only 42% of the energy we actually use today is required to get everything we need and to not lose any comfort.

This is why I annoy long-term efficiency boffins, because I consider efficiency to be a secondary question. Electrification is first, efficiency is used to make it cost beneficial and more economical.

A heat pump takes three units of energy from the environment for every one unit of electricity, because we can do that with electricity. So all of the transportation is three to four times more efficient when electrified than non-electrified. Is that an efficiency measure, or is it an electric benefit of electrification? I tend to call it a benefit of electrification, which is why my short list of climate actions that will work starts, as so many do, with electrify everything.