Notes about a technical roadmap for a Green New Deal by “Rewiring America”
I highly recommend this insightful data-driven technical roadmap for a Green New Deal from Rewiring America, which provides an ambitious yet technically feasible vision of a fully electrified future worth promoting and fighting for. The report has been well summarized by VOX. Using it as a blueprint, I can envision a modified but similarly ambitious European/German “Green Deal” roadmap. Here is the report’s analysis result in a nutshell:
“The maximum feasible transition (MFT) involves two primary stages:
(i) an aggressive WWII–style production ramp–up of 3–5 years, followed by
(ii) an intensive deployment of decarbonized infrastructure and technology up to 2035. This includes supply–side generation technologies as well as demand–side technologies such as electric vehicles and building heat electrification.
a. MFT also calls for close to 100% adoption of decarbonized technology when fossil machines reach retirement age. This is fairly simple to imagine: when someone’s car reaches retirement age, it is replaced with an electric vehicle. When a natural gas plant is retired, it is replaced with nuclear or renewables.
b. An MFT approach would create as many as 25 million net new jobs at peak. (tapering off to about 5 million sustained jobs, roughly double the number of jobs supported directly, and indirectly, by the current energy industry.)
c. Every American household would accrue savings of $1,000–2,000 per year due to lower, more predictable energy prices.
d. The government spending portion for such a transition is $300bN per year for 10 years for an approximate total of $3 trillion.
e. This decarbonization pathway is commensurate with a global climate target of limiting warming to between 1.5◦ C/2.7◦ F and 2◦ C/3.6◦ F — assuming there is no significant deployment of carbon dioxide removal, that other major manufacturing nations (China, Germany, Japan, and South Korea) all follow suit in short order (within a decade), and that some nations are unlikely or unable to decarbonize quickly and are slower to respond.
f. The job creation and the costs of such an ambitious nation–building project turn out to be similar in size and scope and new employment opportunities to the mobilization of U.S. industry for WWII.”
Two of my favorite charts:
VOX: “When it says production ramp-up, it’s no joke. Within three to five years, production of electric vehicles would have to increase four-fold, batteries 16-fold, wind turbines 12-fold, and solar modules 10-fold. Accommodating all those new electricity loads would also mean expanding the size of the grid by three- or four-fold. “Today, we deliver about 450 gigawatts constantly,” says Griffith. “In the model of the future — where everyone’s house is the same size, everyone’s car is the same size, but it’s all electrified — you need to deliver 1,500 to 2,000 gigawatts.””
“….One key aspect of electrification makes this transformation possible, and it represents perhaps the most astonishing finding in Griffith’s modeling: Large-scale electrification would slash total US primary energy demand in half, from around 100 quads to about 45–50. This a huge deal — it means America only needs to produce about half the energy with renewables that it is currently producing with fossil fuels.”
“…And that massive drop in demand assumes no behavior change, no insulated buildings or double-glazed windows, no traditional “efficiency” measures of any kind. The transition from fossil fuel combustion to electricity, in and of itself, is the largest demand-side climate policy available …”
(As an asset owner/manager you may want to make sure that a significant and increasing share of our portfolio us dedicated to production ramp-up and grid expansion related businesses, for a disproportional potential upside…)
VOX: “…In his decarbonization “field manual” […] Griffith is frank about what will be necessary to drive the MFT: “A 100% adoption rate is only achieved by mandate. The invisible hand of markets is definitely not fast enough; it typically takes decades for a new technology to become dominant by market forces alone as it slowly increases its market share each year. A carbon tax isn’t fast enough, either. Market subsidies are not fast enough.” Businesses and the market can and will help, he says, but “when Mother Nature arm–wrestles with the invisible hand, she will always win.” A MFT cannot be accomplished through the usual incremental tax tweaks. A three- to five-year industrial ramp-up, followed by a sustained period of 100 percent substitution, would require wartime mobilization, which entails government taking a direct hand in industry, working with it to hit specific production targets through some mix of incentives, penalties, and mandates. For the first three to five years, it would be something more like a command economy than Americans are used to. It is difficult to imagine such unity of purpose in today’s political circumstances (to say the least), but America has met big challenges with decisive government action before. And Griffith emphasizes that, in proportional terms, today’s task is less substantial than FDR’s. It took the equivalent of 1.8 US GDPs to win World War II, whereas “the total cost of decarbonizing America is more like 1.2 to 1.5 GDPs,” he says. “Proportionally, it’s a significantly smaller interruption to the economy…”
(Note that the term “unity of purpose” indicates that we urgently need a substantial mindset shift and worldview adjustments within parts of the population and political leadership towards a shared understanding regarding the urgency and historic importance of the task at hand — despite the current reality of a post-truth society. This likely requires at least a common understanding of the future costs, damages and risks of global heating to be avoided (reduced) and a rethinking of the concept of economic rationality. We need to be aware that a “declaration of war against global heating” implies not only an accelerated and well-managed simultaneous decline and rise of brown and green industries, respectively, but also a deliberate self-distancing from “free market radicalism” and “fossil fuel dependency”. We must anticipate fierce resistance ranging from discourses of delay from the likes of Lomborg or Shellenbeger — pretending to be reasonable when they are, in fact, terribly misguided — to irrational denialism. To this, our collective response has to be forceful and determined. As long as the “unity of purpose” required for speedy transition is still insufficient, every activity that manages to strengthen it has a huge systemic impact potential.)
VOX: “Energy infrastructure used to be comprised exclusively of big public projects like dams and high-voltage transmission lines. But in an age of distributed energy, much of what can reasonably be thought of as infrastructure is small and distributed, located “behind the meter,” on the customer’s property. Solar panels on the roof, a heat pump and a battery in the basement, and an electric vehicle in the garage are 21st century infrastructure — they are all connected to, and interacting with, the grid. To accomplish the MFT, the US needs to stop financing those behind-the-meter technologies like consumer items and start financing them like infrastructure, with low-cost, government-backed loans. America has done this before, too. The US invented auto financing in the 1920s, radically democratizing car ownership, and the 30-year, government-guaranteed mortgage in the 1930s, radically democratizing home ownership. During the New Deal, the US invented electric co-ops that could access cheap government loans, radically democratizing access to electricity [.…] For the average American household, going fully electric (rooftop power, heat pump, battery, EV) requires about $40,000. Obviously, most people can’t pay that up front, but 4 percent financing could bring it in reach for almost everyone. So the question is how to extend low-cost, government-backed loans to every homeowner and building owner such that electrification becomes the default choice any time a piece of equipment or roof is replaced…”
One conclusion I don’t fully agree with is this: “The report is clear that our old policy approaches will not cut it,” Stokes says. “A carbon tax will not result in sufficient infrastructure turnover at the pace and scale necessary. We need to take a standards and investment approach to transform the economy.””
I believe we can do one thing without leaving the other, for as long as these things are mutually supportive. Even if only a significant part of this roadmap would be realized, when combined with traditional efficiency measures, natural climate solutions, sustainable agriculture, and carbon pricing, we might still achieve a sufficient transition speed that could bring us closer to a <2 degrees C by 2100 scenario. We can think of humanity’s race to zero, where ultimate success is directly measured by the volume of annual global greenhouse gas emissions reductions, as the movement of a heavy object that is sliding down a slope — carbon pricing would increase the steepness of the slope but in addition, we will likely need an additional push, and a reduction of friction, in order to achieve the transition speed that is needed. In this sense, the systemic impact of supporting/enabling interventions can be measured directly by their contribution to “transition acceleration” and indirectly by their contribution to “unity of purpose”. Both represent key outcome targets for our changemaking activities in the decades ahead.
