The future will be electric, renewable, and low carbon, and it's coming soon. In fact, the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
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.
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. Over the past few years, Denmark regularly sees over 100% from wind energy alone, and Germany is now approaching 60% renewables on its grid. Denmark and Germany have among the most reliable grids in the world, 13 minutes of outages per customer per year. This is not actually that hard to do. It’s a transformation. We are transforming our grids and our generation, but we’re doing it very effectively.
But what will work? Pumped hydro is going to be the dominant one for energy storage on grids, just as it is today, just as it’s been since 1907 when the first one was built. This is a highly commoditized solution. It’s great for coal country. I’m fascinated that the discourse in the United States does not include turning coal workers in coal country to building pumped hydro more. It’s just an obvious thing using very strongly overlapping skills and domain knowledge.
Cell-based batteries are really hot right now, lithium-ion especially, but they have limits. They are cost effective for 4 to 8 hours. They’re great for putting sunshine from the afternoon into the evening, but we need longer duration than that. This diagram is from GEIDCO, which is the global energy interconnection development cooperation organization. It’s a UN organization, but it was kicked off by China in 2015 or 2016. To consider how seriously China takes this, the premier of China was at the launch. The executive chairman of GEIDCO is the single person at the top of all grid planning and development and deployment in China, and the person responsible for the development of the Asian Supergrid.
Everybody in Vegas was depressed because of the looming end of the investment tax credit. And I was wandering around thinking, why is everybody so down-faced? Because I’d been in Singapore and I was paying attention to China’s wind energy development, to Latin America’s wind energy development, where I spent time in São Paulo talking wind overlapping with hydro in that great country, and also looking at Australia, and everywhere else wind was booming.
We’re already at a point where in the North America, the North American Council for Freight Efficiency’s Run on Less program in September of 2023, a couple of Tesla semis had service days of over 1000 miles each. That was an electric truck with two or three drivers over the course of the day, a couple of fast charges, driving 1000 miles in a single day, delivering lots of Pepsi, flats of Frito Lay, and the like.
While container shipping of processed and finished goods will increase, it won’t increase as rapidly. We had a very rapid increase from 1980 to 2019, but a lot of that was due to the unprecedented speed of growth of China’s manufacturing capabilities and delivering stuff to the west for our consumer economies. While India, Brazil, and Indonesia are growing, they don’t have the conditions for success to grow as rapidly as China did.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t need some burnable fuels for crossing oceans, but we need a lot less than most people think. In my projections, I don’t claim to be right, I merely claim to be less wrong. Take this as a projection that is likely from one individual. There are other projections which should also inform any strategic decision making you make.
There are several inhibitors on the growth of aviation. One of the key ones is simply that as we decarbonize aviation and we replace that with sustainable aviation biofuels, they’re going to be more expensive than current fuels. The airline industry has 19% of their expenses as fuel. If that doubles or triples in price, those get added to tickets. It’s a significant enough purchase for most people that it will reduce their likelihood of taking flights.
Battery-electric is just as efficient on the tarmac when it’s taxiing, when it’s taking off, and when it’s landing. We’ll start with smaller airplanes. Battery energy density right now are sufficient for a hybrid drivetrain in a turboprop that would carry 100 passengers 600 km, with divert and reserve.
Singapore Airlines has Neste providing 1.5 million tons of sustainable aviation biofuels in Singapore for its operations today. There will be carriers who are actual zero by 2050 quite easily.for the infographics. Over on the left, we have about 20 billion tons of fossil fuels between coal, oil, and gas that we extract, process, refine, and distribute, mostly to burn once. It’s not reusable, there’s no recyclability.
There are a lot of minerals under the earth, and there’s something else going on, material substitution. Material substitution says, I have a copper electricity wire. Well, I could have an aluminum wire instead. Most overhead wires that we see as we drive around actually have aluminum cores with steel for a bit of reinforcement.
The last lever is just reuse. Call it 80 kilograms of lithium in a battery in a Tesla Model 3. It operates for ten years and gets recharged thousands of times. It’s just being used over and over again without being depleted at all, without creating CO2. Then, we will take a bunch of them out of the Model 3s at end of life and stack them all together and create a behind-the-meter battery storage facility for a light industrial site so that we don’t have to increase transmission to it.
That’s not the only waste stream. We also have 2.5 billion tons of food waste. That’s a full third of the calories we manufacture every year globally. We throw it in landfills. There is no caloric poverty, there is a distribution problem when it comes to calories. There is no “biofuels competing with calories for people” problem except in micro local places. We’re wasting vast amounts of biomass, which frequently turns into methane, and we have to fix that.
We also have the emerging area of heat storage. It’s not a slam dunk, it’s a bit overhyped in some ways. It’s too much into the sexy and foolish space, especially when it talks about being used for storing electricity and then retrieving electricity, that’s a very inefficient pathway for electrical storage.
The nice thing about DRI, that synthetic gas currently comes from methane from coal or natural gas. We can use biomethane instead. We also have, and I’ve looked at and done the math on the HyBrit green steel solution and H2Green Steel solution, northern European green hydrogen reduction of iron ore to create iron, to create steel.
We’re already doing drone seeding across large farm areas. We’re seeing Hylio, out of the United States, with 200 pounds of product being applied from a single 14-foot-diameter wingspan hexacopter and two of those units with all the base station and everything costing about 200 grand. A tractor from Jon Deere, which can do the same spraying per day and compacts the soil when used, is about $700,000 to buy. The tractor burns about 13 gallons of diesel an hour. Drones sip at electricity.
Part of it is a full third of that is being used in refineries to make gasoline, diesel, and kerosene for jets. And guess what? Well, that’s going away. We’re not going to be eliminating refining fossil fuels because we still need petrochemicals. But we’re not going to be taking Alberta’s crude out of the ground and spending lots of hydrogen on it to turn it into diesel for tractors or gasoline for cars. The use cases are going down.
Similarly, we’ve been shoving carbon dioxide underground for decades as well, in enhanced oil recovery, and we’ve been putting it in pipelines for that purpose as well. None of this is technically non-viable. There are significant problems of economics and alternatives. It gets really expensive really fast and there are alternatives.
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