Electrify Everything

Check out this chart:

Lots of orange!

What it means is that the biggest piece of our pollution pie isn't cow burps, landfills, or industry—although each of those is a key contributor to climate change and must be dealt with.

The biggest category of pollution is Energy: burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and "natural" gas to heat our homes, fuel our cars, and generate dirty electricity.

Therefore, the single most impactful thing we can do to slow down climate change is to stop burning so many goddamn fossil fuels.

That's the thesis of the clean energy transition. If we quit digging up, refining, shipping, and burning fossil fuels, we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 80%.

How do we do it? We Electrify Everything.

The Plan: Electrify Everything

In practice, this means two things:

1. Replace anything and everything powered by fossil fuels with a fully electric alternative. Got a gas car? Get an EV. Gas boiler? Switch to a heat pump. Gas oven? Try an induction oven! You'll never look back, I promise.
   
2. Replace how we generate electricity—today, that mostly means burning gas (and coal) to create heat in order to spin a magnetic generator—with renewable sources of electricity. Solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal power, hydropower, batteries, and others.

The good news is that the energy transition is well underway. You might not realize it if, like me, you live in America, but last year nearly 50% of the world's

If you're an American like me, you probably didn't hear that 50% of the world's electricity generating capacity now comes from renewable sources. 50%! But we're quietly making progress here at home, too. In 2026, the U.S. generates over 25% of our electricity from renewables, despite the Trump administration doing everything they can to stop it.

The thing is, Trump can't stop it. He can slow it down, but he cannot stop the energy transition. That's for one simple reason: solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are now the cheapest form of electricity generation in the world. This wasn't the case just a few years ago. Today it is indisputable.

And these incredible technologies continue to get cheaper and more efficient every year, with no sign of slowing down.

Sounds relatively simple, right? I mean, except for our government paying wind developers billions of dollars to kill their projects during a global fuel shortage. But, like, in principle, it's straightforward: we retire fossil fuel-powered stuff and replace it with electric stuff.

There are just a few problems.

The First Problem: Our Grid Is Fucked

1. Our energy grid is totally fucked

Our energy grid—often referred to as just the grid—is a vast constellation of incredibly complicated infrastructure: high-voltage transmission lines, substations, transformers, and lower-voltage distribution lines that move electricity around, change its voltage and current, and generally get it from wherever it’s made to wherever it's demanded.

How the grid does all that is interesting (to me, anyway...), but not important right now. There are, however, a few things you should know:

2. The grid has a finite capacity

Electricity isn't like WiFi. We can't just beam it from a solar farm in Upstate New York down to my apartment in Brooklyn. Electricity must be physically moved from place to place. The way we do that is with power lines.

Power lines, unfortunately, have a maximum amount of electricity they can move at a given time. Imagine a garden hose: it would take a long-ass time to fill up a swimming pool with a garden hose because the hose can only move so much water per second. You could add more hoses to mix, or use wider hoses. But you can't force more water into a standard garden hose that it can fit or it'll explode and floor your house.

Same thing is true with power lines, except when they get too overwhelmed with electricity the whole system shuts down (as a way to prevent it from literally exploding). That's how blackouts happen.

All that to say, our energy grid has capacity issues. It's got them right now, in fact. And if our plan is to electrify every single part of our world? Well, our capacity issues are only going to get worse unless we add hella more hoses.

Here's another problem:

3. The grid cannot store electricity

This one is tricky to understand, because electricity in America is so readily available. We flip a switch and the light turns on. But what's going on behind the scenes is actually kind of insane. That's because the grid cannot store electricity.

The electricity that powers the light bulb when you flip the switch is not coming to your home from a giant reservoir, like tap water. It would be super helpful if it did! But it doesn't. What actually happens millions of times a day all around the world is far stranger: every single watt of electricity we use is generated the instant we flip that switch, in real-time, and comes to our homes via power lines at the speed of light. 

Not only that, but our energy grid is incredibly finicky. It must stay perfectly balanced at all times: demand for electricity (i.e. flipping on a light switch) must always match the amount of energy being generated (i.e. a gas plant firing up to spin the generator). If there's ever too much electricity on the grid, or too little, we get big problems.

The grid, they say, is the most complex machine ever made.

So what do we do about this?

Well, if demand for electricity is going to keep growing—and trust me, it is—we should probably add more power-generating renewables to the mix, so that when you want to turn on the lights there's enough electricity to go around.

This brings us to our next problem:

4. The queue to get connected to the grid is years long

For many reasons, building renewables in this country is hard. But the biggest challenge of all is that even if you manage to build the project, you're not done yet: you need to plug it into the grid. That's a process called interconnection, and in America it takes absolutely fucking forever.

New energy project proposals can wait up to seven years (!) to get approved for an interconnection to the grid. There are over 2 terawatts of energy projects—the equivalent of ~2,000 nuclear reactors—waiting to get approved by their local grid operator or utility (it depends on where you are) to plug your project in.

98% of those 2 terawatts stuck in line are solar and wind projects.

To put that terawatt number into perspective, there are only 1.25 terawatts of energy total on our grid today. That means there are more proposed energy projects waiting for approval than there are currently in operation.

Who approves these interconnections, and what’s the hold up? 

That’s a subject for another post—have you subscribed to Green Juice yet??—but suffice it to say, we need to make it much easier to get clean energy projects approved.

But let's say we fix that issue and make it much easier to get renewables onto the grid.

We encounter yet another problem.

5. Wind and solar production is "variable"

Annoyingly, solar panels only work when the sun is shining and wind turbines only spin when the wind's a-blowin'. So even if we built a shit-ton of wind and solar farms and they all got approved for grid interconnections, we still wouldn’t be able to meet our electricity demand. At least not at night.

Guess what else is highly variable?

6. The grid is also highly variable 

People use different amounts of electricity at different times of day, depending on the season. A Texas summer evening at 7pm, when everybody gets home from work and starts watching football and cooking chili and blasting their A/C all at the same time, is an example of intense electricity demand, or what’s known as a peak. 

But electricity demand rises and falls throughout the day, every day. Generally speaking, we use a little when we’re sleeping, more when we wake up, less again during the middle of the day, and the most in the evenings.

So, knowing that power lines can only carry so much electricity at any given time, how do we deal with these peaks?

The answer may disgust you!

7. We meet peak demand today by firing up very dirty, very expensive gas power plants

Whenever demand on the grid peaks, utility companies fire up special gas power plants called peaker plants to make sure we can all watch The White Lotus Season 7 on Sunday nights in our air-conditioned, palatial American homes.

Perhaps you see the conundrum: the times of day that solar panels produce the most energy—aka "daytime"—does not line up with our intense nightly electricity demand. There's actually a name for this phenomenon: the Duck Curve. So-called, because when you compare our total energy demand with and without the addition of solar power, the two lines on a graph look (sort of) like a duck. Solar can supply most of the power we need during the day, but it needs to be offset after dark. Wind turbines can help here, but it depends on where you live.

So what do we do? Can we, say, build a bunch of batteries to store the electricity we make during the day for use later on? Are there other ways besides batteries to store energy? What about less variable ways to produce clean energy? Can we build out more grid infrastructure, or improve the existing grid so it works better? And, hey, don’t electric vehicles have giant batteries in them? Can't we send energy from our EVs and home batteries back into the grid to help meet peak demand?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes!

There are thousands of viable solutions to these thorny problems. Allow me to sketch out a few of them for you now.

The Solutions: An Incomplete List

A: Expand, enhance, and reconductor
We can do things to improve our existing grid infrastructure. We can make it bigger by building more power lines, transformers, and substations. That’s expensive, however, and utility companies are notoriously slow-moving (partly because they don't make as much money off of clean energy, so they slow-walk these projects). An alternative to building is to 'enhance' the grid we’ve already got by making it smarter and more controllable. Right now, we have no idea know how much power is being used on any individual power line, and we can’t redirect the flow of power very easily from low-demand areas to high-demand areas. A third option is to replace the existing power lines with technologically superior lines that can carry more load; this is called “reconductoring”. Remember the garden hose analogy: we can replace the old hose in the backyard with brand new ones that are thicker and more powerful. Without having to expand the grid, we can get something like 30% more capacity just by improving the grid we’ve got.

B: Build utility-scale batteries
The Energizer Bunny would lose his furry little mind if he could see the batteries we’re making today. Scientists and engineers have figured out all kinds of ways to make batteries more energy dense—meaning we can make smaller batteries that store more energy—as well as much, much cheaper to produce. And, just like other 'learning curve' renewables, these improvements are compounding: batteries get 5-8% more dense every year, which means they double in density every ~10 years.

We could build utility-scale battery parks to store the extra electricity created by solar and wind during the day (renewables often generate more power than we can use), and then tap into it when there’s high demand on the grid at night. 

C: Build a huge network of DERs
DERs stands for Distributed Energy Resources. I’ll explain. On the one hand, we’ve got centralized, utility company-owned means of power production like gas and nuclear plants, large-scale renewable projects, etc. But on the other hand, we’ve got an increasingly large number of normal folks with their own small means of energy production and storage in the form of solar rooftop panels, electric vehicles, and lithium-ion home batteries.

All those rooftop solar panels and home batteries collectively generate and store a surprisingly huge amount of power, and the technology exists to send that power into the grid in order to help out during peak demand times. You don't need to wait in a grid interconnection queue: your house is already interconnected! Folks can actually get paid to do this, though the utilities are fighting to pay us as little as possible for our energy contributions.

Imagine a world where there’s tons of rooftop solar—not just on homes, but on schools and warehouses and malls and community centers—all of it serving to balance the overall grid and keep our local communities energy resilient.

There’s massive potential in leveraging DERs. One popular idea is to 'aggregate' or combine a large swath of individual DERs into what's being called a Virtual Power Plant (VPP). Imagine if everyone in Chicago with rooftop solar signed up for a service that allowed a VPP company to leverage all their solar panels at once. The company could divert very small amounts of power from a bunch of homes during key times to areas of need, so the grid doesn't crap out—and they'd pay the suppliers for their borrowed energy.

D: Build more 'clean firm' energy
'Clean firm' in green energy parlance refers to sources of renewable energy that are not variable. Sun and wind, recall, are variable because they do not produce energy around the clock. But geothermal and hydro do. Here's a brief explanation of how those work.

Geothermal: Fun fact! The earth’s molten inner core is roughly the same temperature as the surface of the sun. This heat radiates outwards, towards the surface—so much so that we only have to dig a couple thousand feet down into the mantle for things to start heating up. This naturally occurring heat is constant. Geothermal taps into it by capturing the heat energy in the form of steam. Steam has the power to spin the electromagnetic turbines that generate electricity. 

(FYI, the above paragraph is a pretty oversimplified explanation of geothermal. I’ll be doing a deeper dive in, you guessed it, a later post.)

Hydro: Dams create electricity by using the force of rushing water to spin turbines. Since rivers are (generally) always flowing, it’s considered a source of clean firm energy. Man-made hydro is a very promising new technology that can both generate and store energy. Speaking of which… 

E: Build non-battery storage
There are a number of good ways to store energy besides batteries. One is man-made, closed-loop hydro: in a nutshell, the idea is to build a huge swimming pool at the top of a hill and fill it with water, and to build an empty pool at the bottom of the hill. Then, during peak-demand hours, you can send the water from the top of the hill to the bottom through a tube. Inside the tube is a generator, the same as what you'd use in a dam, so the water generates power. Then, the next morning, when clean energy is cheap again, you use cheapo electricity to pump the water back up to the top pool. Rinse and repeat every day for approximately 100 years.

There’s also thermal storage, i.e. energy stored as heat. Several startups are working on what climate folks refer to as the 'bricks in a box' model of thermal storage. Literally, heating up a bunch of bricks stacked in a very well-insulated box using a toaster-like heating mechanism. Depending on the material they’re made of, these bricks can get insanely hot and retain their heat for a long time. A similar principle to hydro applies here: you can heat the bricks up when clean energy is cheap, then convert it back to electricity (or turn it into steam, or just use the pure heat) when you need it.

Geothermal, too, allows for a form of energy storage. You can cap the well where the steam comes out of the ground and then release the built-up steam as needed.

F: Repurpose retired coal plants
The big advantage to building solar and wind farms on the site of retired coal plants is that those plants already have an interconnection to the grid, so you can skip the queue.

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Phew. That was a lot! But it’s important to provide context for these big structural problems we’re facing. The task ahead of us is clear: we need to build more clean energy production and storage, expand and improve our energy grid, and make big changes to how our utility companies operate.

Wanna help make it happen? Read about how you can Get Involved.