Why Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half!

27:07The other day, it was 72%. And you will have, of course, you will have people who will say, oh, but what about the last 10 %? And the last 10 % will be the most difficult 10%. There's no doubt. But even getting to 80%, which some countries have done now. Denmark, I think, are now around 90%. Of course, they have interconnections and they can have hydro from the Scandinavian countries nearby and so on. But still, we've seen such tremendous progress at just how far you can push renewables, which was unthinkable 20 years ago, completely unthinkable. In global statistics, you wouldn't be able to see solar and wind.

27:47It was tiny. And now you see that they actually generate a significant chunk. Yeah. If you just think about it from a lay person's point of view where you don't really know the granular detail, but you can understand. Like at my house, I've got solar panels, I've got batteries. The solar charges the batteries. When that happens, I don't buy any electricity from the group. That's not hard to understand. But then to do it on a scale, on a kind of national scale, you just go, well, that's a very, very big battery and that's a lot of solar panels. But I mean, the most crude question I've got about this is, do we have enough raw materials to make what would have to be, on a global sense, like petawatt hours of electricity storage?

28:33I mean, is that feasible or am I thinking about it in the wrong way? Yeah, I think so. There's different camps out there as with everything, but in one camp would say that there is enough raw materials by a very wide margin and it's not a problem. And I think in physical terms, how much material there is, they're right. The question is how much of that can be extracted. Without destroying everything else. Exactly, which time scales. And I'm just reading a book called Extraction, which is kind of all about lithium mining in Chile and kind of the edge of greed capitalism, I think is the subtitle.

29:09And it's very interesting because, of course, there is an impact of anything we do on this planet. There's an impact on a social and environmental impact of some kind. And that's important. I think equally it's important to compare it against the current system and not just be purist about it and say, oh, we can't have any environmental impact because if it does, then we shouldn't be doing it. And often it's actually people who have never had a problem with the impact of the fossil fuel industry, which is much, much larger, and then point out that there are some issues with lithium mining or copper mining.

29:43And that I think is disingenuous. So I think recycling would be interesting. And that's a really, I think, important topic that is not talked about enough. How can we create a circular economy in a clean energy system? It's only now, I think, becoming really relevant because the first batteries from electric cars that came to market at the Nissan Leaf was in 2010, I think. And then the Tesla Model S was 2012. And only, that was tiny. I mean, the numbers of cars sold globally was tiny. And now we have millions. So the next few years, we're going to have more cars that come to the end of their life.

30:17And then we have more opportunity for large scale battery recycling. Can we actually set up a battery recycling industry? And on what timescale will that work? I think that's really important because once you have enough materials in circulation, In theory, you just keep reusing it and there will be some loss, but my understanding is most of it can be reused with existing technology and can be recycled. So we've got to pay more attention to how we do that. The company that I first heard about that we're doing on scale, Redwood Materials in the United States, which is one of the founders of Tesla, started it.

30:53I'm trying to remember his name and it's gone. Anyway, him, he's very clever. It's colossal. I mean, it's a massive industrial scale plant they have in the desert where they're recycling just thousands of tons. And they're talking about 95 to 97 % of all the materials in the batteries. Again, you just go, that is bonkers. I think there is a similar factory in Switzerland. It might even be Glem Cor that is operating that. Well, it's going to be a new form of mining in a sense. You're extracting those materials. I think that's mine in Belgium as well. Is that right? I do want to go and say, there's a few things I want to see before.

31:30You know, I want to see them go. But one of the, you know, on that topic, it's just a matter of personal shame. When the first person said to me, well, everything we use is either dug up or grown. I immediately thought, no, what about, and then I was trying to think of things that we don't dig up or grow. And that there aren't there. Well, there's Ed Conway's book, Material World. Yes. And it's absolutely fascinating because we really have no idea where the stuff we use every day comes from. Unless you go to the lengths that he's gone to and you investigate and you trace things back in the supply chain.

32:06And you find out that in the supply chain, there might be one very critical factory that is making a particular component. And without that, the whole thing would fall apart. But I think we have, as a society, a completely lost connection to the resources we use, where they come from and how they've been provided. That is an important conversation to have, no doubt. Absolutely. And it is those things like the kind of... It's much less. I mean, I'm sure you've sensed this, but it is one thing that I've noticed is that the criticisms that I would regularly witness about electric vehicles or renewable energy, They've changed considerably.

32:46They've reduced enormously. But there's still some points where people will have heard something in the last 10 years. And, oh, what about all the cobalt that's in your factory dug up by children? Well, it's about 1 % of all cobalt is dug up by human beings. All those excuses. But also, the last four electric cars that I've test driven don't have any cobalt or nickel in them. They're all LFP batteries. and cobalt is used by the oil industry to remove sulfur. And that kind of information, I bang on about it all the time, but it isn't in the general understanding. It's not. And I think there's always a delay where the evidence has already moved on, technology has moved on, but perception is still based on information that is dated 10, 15 years out of date.

33:32And people still believe it and it's being repeated all the time. I mean, you can spend all day long just addressing the same myths, technologies, and they keep coming. I mean, it's incredible. I mean, the same goes for heat pumps, right? Yeah. And clearly some of that is just people are misinformed. I think there is also, and we know that because it's been exposed by investigative journalists, there's a deliberate misinformation campaign going on. I mean, you know this very well, and I know you've tried to counter that with factual information. But this is one of the key obstacles. It's not so much technological.

34:10I think it's psychological. It's the same with electric cars. The problems that anybody might have, it's absolutely not technological. It's what you feel and I couldn't charge it. I wouldn't know how to do it. I don't know how it would work. And you go, well, just have a go. You'll find it's very mundane in many ways, isn't it? And what about then, because that's the other one, the sort of few things that come up every now and then. So I think finally hydrogen as a fuel source for transportation has gently been moved into the long term care home. But small modular nuclear reactors, carbon capture and storage.

34:54There's another one. There's three that I couldn't. Fusion. Fusion. Thank you. yes those all seem to come up every now and then and i mean none of them are bad ideas it's not like it's not like let's drill for more gas no that i don't agree with but if it's more modular nuclear reactors if they work make make loads of them brilliant i haven't yet seen one and then carbon capture and storage well it's not going to destroy the world if you capture a load of carbon please carry on oh how much electricity does it use oh my god it's i mean are they are any of those in your mind, viable technologies?

35:31Certainly not in the medium term, right? Because, I mean, there's not a single SMR, small modular reactor connected commercially operating in the whole world. I'm not aware of it. I don't think there is. And scaling that supply chain will take a lot of time. It's not going to happen overnight. It won't happen in two or three years. So the time from commercialization to mass deployment, that's too long. to make a significant difference in the medium term, maybe in the long term. Sure, that may happen. But by 2035, that's what I think is the medium term, it won't play a significant role. It's just hard to see how, even if it became commercially available tomorrow, it's not going to scale that rapidly.

36:14And when it comes to fusion, I mean, there's a saying in the energy sector that fusion is always 30 years away. Yes, you read the papers all the time that there's been some success and something has happened. But again, it's quite a long way from commercialization if it ever happens. I'm not saying we shouldn't be doing the research by any means. If it worked, it could be wonderful and amazing. Well, if it could use the nuclear waste stuff we've got in Sellafield, if it could used that well and didn't produce more waste. It's just difficult to see how you could construct an energy strategy that's viable around a technology that is not yet available and proven.

36:59There's a bit of a wishful thinking, I'd say, if you did that. And then what was the other one? Carbon capture and storage. We're going to need some of it to remove carbon from the atmosphere. If you want to bend down the curve of emissions in the atmosphere and also there will be some Some residual emissions from livestock, agriculture, some processes in industry where it's impossible to electrify. It's very difficult to see how you can eliminate the emissions fully. And carbon capture for that, sure. We may need it. The question is, again, how much do you rely on it for your long-term strategy?

37:36And I just don't see it playing a major role in, we're going to have blue hydrogen and and replace all the gas in the pipes and carbon capture will be offering us that opportunity to make blue hydrogen at scale. I just don't see how that would work. There's simply no evidence for it taking off in the way that we have been promised many times by the industry, but it hasn't happened yet. I mean, I filmed Drax B power station in Yorkshire in the UK over 20 years ago and there was a big PR push then. We've got a lot of emissions now, but we're going to use carbon capture. I didn't know, so I was going, oh, that's brilliant.

38:15Amazing. Well done. 20 years later, they haven't done it. They burn wood there now. They don't burn coal. That's right. Until recently, there was, I think, one single power station in the world in Canada that had carbon capture fitted. But first of all, it didn't capture all of the carbon. It only captured a small amount. and also used the carbon emissions to then get more oil out of the material.

38:42And it wasn't particularly cost effective either. So now I think there's a few in China, I believe, or Southeast Asia, but it's only a handful and certainly the dream of clean coal has not materialized. I mean, let's face it. And in the meantime, of course, we now have a situation where often solar and batteries, wind are cheaper than coal generation or gas generation. Therefore, how could you then outcompete these technologies if you add another technology, another cost to it? It's hard to see how you would be able to do that. But it does feel to me, and I'd love you to correct me if I'm wrong, but it does seem to me that it's the economics that are making as big a shift as anything else.

39:25You can have government policy and you can have the right attitudes because we want to protect the environment. But economics is a very powerful driving force. If it's cheaper, I was in Australia earlier this year, the solar farms I went to see there are on a monstrous scale with sheep. Very good combination. Agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics. They're very popular. It's cheaper. In Australia where coal is sort of free, it's still cheaper to use solar and batteries. and they're putting in massive batteries the size of large housing estates. There's no, it seems to be no limit. They just get bigger and bigger.

40:01Yeah, or Pakistan is a really interesting case study where I've sort of followed the solar adoption there for quite closely. And I think it was something like only 1 % a few years back and we're now at more than 20 % of the entire electricity generation in Pakistan. And most of that is actually rooftop solar because people have realized it's cheaper to have moved up solar than buying electricity from the grid. And it's more reliable. The grid is actually not that reliable in Pakistan. So you have this real, from the ground up, grassroots adoption of technology suddenly because it's become more economic and affordable.

40:37And that wasn't the case 10 years ago. It's really changed. Because I'm sort of going back to when I first heard about these things when I was in Germany and I spoke to a government minister in Berlin about, and I can't say it, you'll be able to say it, I'm going to say Energiaia Venda, but that's not it. Energiaia Venda. Energiaia Venda, thank you. I wasn't a million miles away, but it sounded such an amazing aim to do this and it was expensive because the solar was expensive and everything was... It didn't feel like for the common person, it's not going to affect their lives. And now, certainly in Africa, I know solar has had an enormous impact on people who have never had electricity.

41:17In a sense, a bit like cell phones, you miss the copper wire bit and just have a cell phone. We had someone here at Oriel College to give a talk actually who worked for a company in, I think it was Nigeria, and they offer people off the grid a package of a battery of a solar panel and a flat screen TV. And often it's the TV that sells the package. But then once you have the solar and the battery and the TV, then the next thing might be, well, maybe instead of cooking with biomass, you might try induction cooking. You can do other things on top of that. That's a complete game changer. If you suddenly have electricity, you can charge your phone, you have a TV, you can watch the news and then sport.

42:00It's incredible. Charge your phone. Do you think then generally speaking, because it sounds like you are relatively optimistic, realistically grounded, but you're generally optimistic that the human race can move on from the fossil, really from burning stuff. I mean, that's what we've been doing for 10 ,000 years. I think you have to be optimistic. Because otherwise you may as well just give up. I think actually optimism is, I'm often told, oh, you're naive. How can you be optimistic? Look at the numbers and yes, fossil fuel consumption is not going down fast enough. In fact, it's been rising in a lot of countries.

42:41Adoption of technology is not happening fast enough. Carbon emissions rising. So we're failing, aren't we? So just give up. Sometimes I'm told by people who actually they are environmentalists. They want to stop the problem. I think if you have that mindset, you're never going to change anything. You have to believe in the possibility of change and that means you have to be optimistic and believe that change is possible. So I think it's almost a tool that you have to use in order to effectuate change in the world. But I'm also optimistic just looking at how much... I mean, I've worked in energy for 22 years now.

43:19I started in 2004 as a student research assistant and have seen just over that two decade period, the industry changed so sick. Phenomenal change. Unbelievable change. And that is against a lot of obstacles with difficult economics. And we're now in a situation where the question is how fast can we scale rather than are the technologies viable? We have, not all of them, but we have most of the technologies already. They will keep getting better and they will keep getting cheaper. So we have all the ingredients we need. Yes. The question is whether the politics and our cultural and social political...

43:57Well, I don't want to do a conspiracy theory, but the pressure is completely understandable. I've always said this from the fossil fuel industry, that's how they earn a living and they want to keep selling the stuff they've extracted from that. Of course, I mean, if you are a lobbyist for a fossil fuel company, you will be looking at... Motivated. you will be motivated to promote solutions that benefit your business. Just as, of course, if you were a lobbyist for a renewable energy firm, you would be the same. So we shouldn't be surprised. I think the difference is that 80 % is still largely fossil fuels.

44:28The amount of resources available to these industries is different.

44:37I've looked up yesterday. So we have 47 years, according to someone in one of the IEAs. or the 47 years of fossil fuel left at current consumption rates of known reserves. So we have trillions of barrels of oil, it's not running out, but we could. I don't think we'd ever run out, but it would just become incredibly expensive to get what remains. It becomes harder and harder. I've never seen that before. I was thinking about talking to you today and I went, I didn't know that someone had worked at 47 years. I haven't looked at this recently, but I think the story has been historically that whenever people have predicted we're going to run out of certain resources, there's always new discoveries.

45:26They find some more. I think it was Paul Ehrlich, who was an evolutionary biologist, maybe at Stanford, and he made a bet with an economist, I think called Simon, and they were betting on resources running out and they basically used the price I think as an indicator of scarcity and they had I think 10 different resources and Paul Alec said look all of these would be much more expensive in 10 years time and Julian Simon I think was his name bet against it and they both put a check down and said look if you win in 10 years you're going to get that from you and in 10 years later I think almost all of the resources had gone down in price and Paul Alec lost the bet and it was That was kind of the most prominent case, perhaps.

46:13And of course, the Club of Rome at the time published their report about running out of resources, limits to growth. And the limits to growth. And I think the problem is not so much the availability of resources, but if we burned through them all, we're going to be in a knock on the planet. We'll just be very difficult to live on for us as a human race. I think the other one that's in a similar way with my entire childhood and early years was all about the population explosion, the population bomb. There were books that were... That's Paul Ehrlich. That's Paul Ehrlich. Yeah, he loved a bit of population.

46:48And then the most recent book I've read about it is, what are we going to do? Because the population is literally falling off a clear. Every country in the world except Afghanistan at the moment, I think it's the only one, the birth rate has dropped precipitously even in countries which we as westerners would assume like bangladesh yeah it's below when when i was born yeah it's 2.5 children you know when i was born bangladesh is below that right you think my god that's changed yeah and it's if women are educated if there's basic health services people have less babies because more of them live yeah it's quite yeah sort of something but that i think was not you know but paul ehrlich did not predict that he predicted it with just and so the actual you know it's conceivable that in a hundred years There'll actually be a lot less human beings on the planet, not a result of war or famine.

47:32There'll be a few less of us. When I read that book, I went through my address book and saw all my... Because I've had two children. I've looked at all these... And I went, oh, no kids, no kids. I was three. She had three. Disgusting. None, none, one, one, one, one. It was none or one. It was very common. And I was... I'd never even thought about it. But the fact that we didn't even... Because you need more than two to do replacement, don't you? The mathematics is beyond me. I haven't studied population dynamics. No, it's a different topic. I'm sure it's very interesting. Last thing, just because I'm fascinated when I see new technology.

48:11I saw this extraordinary company in Australia that I'd heard of this notion before, but of using weight to store energy so that you drop a weight down a mine shaft. And I can understand it and as it drops it spins the generator and then you use cheap electricity to pull it back up. They've gone one step further. It's a very clever system of non-stop constant charging and discharging. And it's in the megawatt capacity. So those little ideas are fascinating. But I wonder if there's a technology that you've seen that is in its formative stages. Yeah, I mean, I would say heat batteries are definitely one to watch.

48:47And by heat batteries, I mean large batteries that can be used for industrial processes. There's now about 40 companies at least I counted that can offer heat batteries. Very large range of temperatures from just the low hundreds degree centigrade. So maybe in a brewery, in a food and drinks industry. So it can boil water. Yeah, maybe textiles. It's quite low temperatures of pulp and paper all the way to quite high temperatures up to 1 ,500 degrees centigrade. And the beauty, I think, with heat batteries is that you can use an abundance of different materials. It could be sand. There's a company using sand.

49:24You can use old bricks. You can use manufactured materials from waste materials. There's a wide range of materials you can use for that. And they're modulizable. You can make little by big ones, similar to really electric batteries. And they don't need that much space, physical space. and they can be running flexibly, harvesting cheap electricity and then providing heat 24-7. So I think that's an interesting space to watch because it's fairly new, very novel, and industry is the next, you know, that's kind of the next big thing I think that needs to happen. We have, I mean, we've done really well on transport, I'd say, certainly on road transport now when it comes to innovation.

50:03Buildings, I mean, heat pumps are really the technology I think that will dominate that space. but industry is still in its infancy. I mean, yeah, industrial heat pumps will do some of it but for the higher temperatures they struggle. So I think heat batteries definitely one of the technologies in the watch I'd say. I mean, just because it's come back recently but I mean, I spent a couple of visits to Orkney where they have got tidal turbines there which are very clever ideas but I think even they would acknowledge salt water and metal and electronics. It's a complicated, challenging mixture. But apparently there is a very large 1.1, 1.2 megawatt turbine operating in Japan that is proving itself to be very...

50:50I sort of scratched it off the list. I think that's never going to happen. Maybe. It's probably more unlikely. But then sometimes there's a breakthrough and suddenly there is a technology that wasn't on people's radar and it does really have a massive impact. I mean, lithium-ion batteries were invented at least partly in Oxford, not far from here and that was in the 70s. Without that breakthrough, we wouldn't be having the ability to drive EVs around because there was such a difference in weight and the ability to store electricity. So these things happen once in a while. But there's a lot of competing technologies in the mix that I'm always skeptical until you see that there's actually demand picking up.

51:40There's professionalization of the industry and it's not just a pilot project. Because those things always sound wonderful until you only need one person to explain to you. But the idea of a tidal barrier across the River Seven in this country and you see the tides. I know that river quite well. It's phenomenal difference. And you go, yeah, you just build a wall. Where does the stuff that you build the wall come from? It's basically Devon. You dig up Devon and you spread it. It's such an enormous project that you just go, okay, I understand why that might not happen. Those things. Yeah, and it's been such fun.

52:13I mean, I'll just check the time. Oh, yeah, we've done. But I think we've covered lots of things. Lots of crap. Yeah, I mean, it's been wonderful. Oh, I'm going to do one last one. This is definitely the last one. So you've got a house and it's well insulated and you, but the roof is unsuitable for solar panels, but you can get a variable tariff on your electricity. Is it worth, is it worth going for a battery rather than solar? This is very domestic question. Oh gosh, that's a hard question. Because I think I feel it, I'm encouraging people are going, don't worry about solar, get a battery first.

52:55Because anyone can put a battery in their house and solar is often more challenging and depending on the house and all that stuff. But I can sense that I've benefited from having batteries. But in the winter, I charge for less money in the nighttime and I use that electricity in the day. It seems to work fairly. Yeah. I mean, I think you have to look at it on a case by case basis. Like what's the cost of the battery? What tariff would you have? Clearly for some people, it makes sense. But I wouldn't go as far as saying it always makes sense. You should always have a battery. And it depends on your usage and how you operate the battery, what tariff you're on and the cost.

53:31And how you use electricity. So there's all these factors. But yeah, I think we're getting now into a position where it makes sense for more and more people. It's making more and more sense. I mean, what I love that is a perfect illustration of my, yeah, just get a battery and shut up. And let's think about this a little bit more carefully, which is why you're a professor in Oxford University. and I'm not. But that is, yeah, and thank you so much. It's been a real joy to talk to you. Pleasure. Thank you.

54:03Really hope you enjoyed that. But that's all. Do join us again next week for another sizzling episode of the Everything Electric podcast.