Electrify An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future

An optimistic--but realistic and feasible--action plan for fighting climate change while creating new jobs and a healthier environment: electrify everything.

Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now—but what? Saul Griffith has a plan. In Electrify, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint—optimistic but feasible—for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith’s plan can be summed up simply: electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future. 
 
Griffith, an engineer and inventor, calls for grid neutrality, ensuring that households, businesses, and utilities operate as equals; we will have to rewrite regulations that were created for a fossil-fueled world, mobilize industry as we did in World War II, and offer low-interest “climate loans.” Griffith’s plan doesn’t rely on big, not-yet-invented innovations, but on thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. We can still have our cars and our houses—but the cars will be electric and solar panels will cover our roofs. For a world trying to bounce back from a pandemic and economic crisis, there is no other project that would create as many jobs—up to twenty-five million, according to one economic analysis. Is this politically possible? We can change politics along with everything else.

Saul Griffith, inventor, entrepreneur, and engineer, is founder of Rewiring America, a nonprofit dedicated to decarbonizing America by electrifying everything, and founder and chief scientist at Otherlab. He was a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2007.

PREFACE xi
1 A GLIMMER OF HOPE 1
2 WE HAVE LESS TIME THAN YOU THINK 11
3 EMERGENCIES ARE OPPORTUNITIES FOR LASTING CHANGE 21
4 HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW? 29
5 2020s THINKING 47
6 ELECTRIFY! 51
7 WHERE WILL WE GET ALL THAT ELECTRICITY? 63
8 24/7/365 75
9 REDEFINING INFRASTRUCTURE 97
10 TOO CHEAP TO METER 103
11 BRINGING IT ALL HOME 111
12 A MORTGAGE IS A TIME MACHINE 125
13 PAYING FOR THE PAST 131
14 REWRITE THE RULES! 137
15 JOBS, JOBS, JOBS 145
16 MOBILIZING FOR WORLD WAR ZERO 163
17 CLIMATE CHANGE ISN’T EVERYTHING 173
APPENDIXES: RABBIT HOLES 189
A YES, AND . . . 191
B WHAT CAN YOU DO TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE? 203
C DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: CLIMATE SCIENCE 101 211
D DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: HOW TO READ A SANKEY FLOW DIAGRAM 219
E DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: LOOK FOR YOURSELF 229
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 231
NOTES 233
INDEX 245