Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Sydney Morning Herald, MIT and University of Sydney Graduate Saul Griffith thinks we can completely replace the Australian vehicle fleet with EVs by 2030, though more research is required into decarbonising heavy industry.
Carbon dreaming: how to fix the climate crisis
By Nick O’Malley and Peter Hannam
August 14, 2021 — 12.01am…
One person worth asking is engineer and physicist Saul Griffith, who lives in a rambling suburban home backing onto the rainforest of the Illawarra escarpment at Austinmer south of Sydney.
Before he fled a locked down Los Angeles to return to Australia, Griffith, a graduate of the University of Sydney and MIT, completed the most detailed inventory of how American households use power.
He and a team at one of the non-profit organisations he co-founded, Rewiring America, worked out how much power and gas American homes and small businesses used for transport, heating, cooling and lighting and household appliances.
…
NSW Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean says Griffith, who he uses as a “sounding board” on similar issues, is “basically a genius”.
So can Australia decarbonise at the speed the IPCC says is necessary?
“Oh yeah,” says Griffith. “We could shit it in.”
Griffith’s mantra for Australia is the same as it is for America – electrify everything. Indeed he is establishing a Rewiring Australia organisation to advocate for such policies.
By his calculations Australia can reduce emissions by more than 50 per cent by the end of the decade by replacing gas and coal-fired power with renewables and helping households, small business and light-manufacturing deploy solar and battery technology to replace internal combustion vehicles as well as gas-burning water and space heating appliances.
…
A further benefit of a large electric vehicle fleet would be that the batteries in parked cars would serve as a vast and interconnected back-up to the grid.
…
Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/carbon-dreaming-how-to-fix-the-climate-crisis-20210812-p58ici.html
Skipping past the bit where Saul Griffith proves Santa Claus is real, by ensuring everyone in Australia receives a brand new EV, without massive tax hikes, vastly increased household or government debt, or other major economic dislocations, and overlooking Australia’s huge distances, imagine for a moment that your brand new EV was part of the grid battery backup system.
It is a freezing cold, cloudy windless winter morning, the solar panels have not yet come on stream, but everyone switched on their home heating to drive back the morning chill, as soon as they got out of bed. Some people left the heating on all night. Many people had a hot shower or bath to shake off the chill – they had to use electricity, because the solar hot water system is not yet receiving enough sunlight. Having enjoyed a breakfast of eggs on toast (its cold) and a hot coffee or two, now you need to get work. So you hop into your shiny new EV, which has been draining back into the grid all night to cover the winter surge in demand, and push the start button.
I don’t think you need to be a certified genius to figure out what happens next.
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Let them learn the hard way.
Every country has one.
US has its engineer liar named Mark Z Jacobson of Stanford who claims the US could go emission-less 100% renewable grid electricity. Of course he conjures up mythical hydro power dams build-outs and winds that never stop blowing to make that appear to work to the Ignorati unable to do critical evaluations of such nonsense.
and Australia has Saul Griffith, the Down-under renewable energy engineer liar.
I had to sit in on one of his seminars a few years ago and I wanted to scream.
There are more and more real world failures. The life of a unicorn salesman should be getting harder and harder.
Let’s see…we move the overly expensive green energy via an electrical grid to my car’s batteries losing some 20% in heat due to transmission, conversion, and charging, then take that back from my cars batteries losing say another 10% in transmission and conversion to use for something else? Did I get that about right?
So of the power that costs twice as much to produce I eventually use it at 70% efficiency leaving all EV cars discharged in some possible emergency situation.
Sounds like a great plan.
(I am keeping my gas-powered truck, thank you very much)
It’s rather like giving the government direct access to everyone’s savings account … promising they’ll pay it all back when they have excess.
How long before everyone becomes broke?
And what effect will all this have on global temperature in 2100?
This guy is simply A Troll – just coming out with impossible-to-do stuff and thus wind folks up.
Ohhhhhhhh alright, lets have some fun and feed him.
Feed him unreliable energy
If nothing else, a few random power cuts, brownouts and blackouts (##) will slow down his bloviationing and give him time to actually think the <expletive> thing thro.
## ’bout time somebody coined ‘Green Outs‘ to describe the upcoming, haphazard & random failures of ‘Green’ elecktrikery.
wots rekkon
I hadn’t considered that. I assumed he was just an idiot.
” ’bout time somebody coined ‘Green Outs‘ to describe the upcoming, haphazard & random failures of ‘Green’ elecktrikery.”
I like the sound of ‘Green Outs‘
No, He and Greta are P.R. devices to add momentum to a long con in the peak payoff phase.AGW is now turning over $70,000 a second around the world, and will continue until falling temperatures and exorbitant energy prices cause riots. Australia will be one of the hardest hit countries as our per capita spending on Windy Things is 4 times the OEDC average. When interest rates revert to normal our power prices will sky rocket, our industry will grind to a halt and our standard of living will fall sharply. That’s what you get for having a merchant banker who trades carbon offsets as a prime minister. Do you remember Malcolm Turnbull, Clive Palmer and Al Gore cooperating on the ” Fall Back Position ” when Malcolm’s carbon tax bill could not pass?
Stop Snowy 2 now. At an efficiency of around 55% it will be an enormous drain on the power grid.
Modern Science: plausible, but likely improbable, and often impossible in a comprehensive frame of reference.
And I thought Wylie Coyote, Super Genius was just a cartoon character.🤪
Chuckling at the thought of Wylie Coyote opening the “ACME” crate containing solar panels or a wind turbine…
Does Wylie put the solar panels on the blades?
It’s going to be fun drIving those EV’s from Brisbane to Perth to do a little winter surfing. Be sure to stop at the Olympic Dam on your way and see the copper mine that had to increase it’s production 5 times to supply the windings for your electric motors.
Driving from Brisbane to Perth is quite possibly one of the most boring trips one can drive. There are probably more boring in Siberia, but I’ll bet it’s a close call.
Perth to Brisbane: 4,313 km.
Yeah, but you need to have the side trip to Roxby Doonman mentioned.
So turn right at Port Augusta and head north for another… 230km, visit the mine, then south again back to Port Augusta to rejoin your roadtrip.
Perhaps that’s a typo? Or perhaps I’m not enough gf a genius to understand what that genius is saying?
The words “shit” and “f*ck” turn out to be very versatile in Aussie English… 🙂
I think in this context, shit means to wave a magic wand like Harry Potter or a pistol like Stalin.
From the above article:
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” — Bible, Romans 1:22, King James Version (KJV)
If this keeps up, in the not too distant future it will be considered slanderous to say someone is a genius. Or an activist.
Matt Kean is an idiot. He, as the whole of his party are supposed to be conservatives, but in truth they are just a another shade of socialists.
Not accurate, unfortunately the party split some years ago and now the real Libs are fighting back and succeeding slowly against the Liberals In Name Only globalist lefties who successfully infiltrated and took over executive positions of influence to manipulate from.
Kean is a LINO and said to be influential as a LINO leader.
“everyone switched on their home heating”
What makes you think home heating will be permitted under this scheme?
I taught senior capstone design at two of the top 300 American universities for a total of seven years, and I advised an additional four groups during two years before that. In a university the guys referred to as “genius” likely had a 4.0 or near 4.0, but on book material. When it came to senior design teams of those geniuses often couldn’t do a thing. Generally the 2.0 and 3.0 students got projects organized, built, tested and working. The best student I ever had was a 3.0 that the other faculty thought was mediocre.
When someone is described by academics as “genius”, like say John Holdren, it is time to vet their ideas carefully.
That says a whole pile about the other faculty.
In my experience the best capstones were done by the students with the best marks. That also says something about the other faculty.
One of the standards in engineering education says students have to be able to apply knowledge in a context other than that in which it was learned. If the students with the best marks do lousy capstones, that implies the school is not achieving that standard.
We should find a way to talk about this some time. Our curriculum is highly theoretical rather than applied — I was an exception being a Ph.D. in a scientific program, but also a P.E. with a lot of applied experience. I can understand why our top GPA students do poorly in the capstone course — because of our curriculum; I’d like to know what there is in your curriculum that made for a better match of GPA to performance on applied projects.
He is certianly not an electical engineer, as he has no basic understanding of how electrical grids work. I looked at his site, he is a metalurgist. That’s cool, but does not give him any more credibility on grid scale power generation than any other lay person.
And it shows!
Every time a lithium battery is recharged – it shortens its life- yes, lithium batteries do not live forever.
And not just lithium batteries.
You don’t have to be an electrical engineer to understand how a grid works; there’s plenty of technical literature for every level of education and understanding if one is curious and open to learning outside their specialisation.
Learning from a book is not “understanding”.or being competant.
Could you learn to drive by reading a book
Grid operation is much more complex than most think, and this is being demonstrated each time we have a grey/black/brown/green..”out” or demand management is deployed ( basic admission of failure to supply).
I wasn’t proposing that anyone could operate a grid, and yes, you need to learn the traffic rules before jumping in a car, unless you live in the sticks somewhere.
I know a metallurgist who is so challenged by engineering.
Dumb idea. Not to mention that EV batteries are very expensive and do have a limited cycle life. I’d have very little interest in loaning out my EV storage to the grid unless I was to be adequately renumerated for its use when it came time to spend the thousands of dollars it takes to replace one years earlier than otherwise expected.
You sound as though you imagine that you’d have a choice
Well I happen to have a PhD in chemistry from UniSyd and I’m embarrassed by the innumeracy of this person.
Anyone with a calculator can look at the price of gasoline, and the price of electricity and easily work out that EVs are more expensive to run than ICE cars on a like vs like comparison. I’m including gasoline excise in that calc, which is currently 43.3 c/L Aussie. The excise is for road upkeep, which is why for an apples to apples comparison it needs to be applied equally.
Last year at the depths of the Covid recession EVs were more expensive to run even ignoring gasoline excise, since the gasoline price was down around AU$1/L vs the retail electricity price I pay, which is 34c/kWh.
And with the rise in electricity price as electricity demand massively increases with EV take up this equation is only going to get worse for EVs. Especially as guys like this force closure of baseload power stations like Liddell – which is due to shut in a year or so.
It’s crazy. Even if you believe in the climate fairies it’s crazy. But no global warming has occurred this century according to real world data, which makes it even more ludicrous.
If no subsidy is required,
the cost of EV are the same as the average car today,
there is a reliable way to charge whenever needed and
there is an easy and cheap way to recycle old EVs
the goal would be easily achieved by market forces.
But . . . . .
And I’d want one that will do 1,600km a charge, and with some serious off-road capabilities for my property. If that’s not possible, I’d have to have two cars.
If you are charging off the grid, then you are heavily subsidized since gas and diesel are highly taxed and electricity isn’t.
I don’t know where you live, but even highly subsidized electrics are substantially more expensive compared to equivalent ICE cars.
He might have a high IQ but he has no brains
Electrification requires massive infrastructure
The Eastern Interconnected Grid in Australia is a disaster in the making
It relies on large coal fired stations
These are been shutdown
It relies on interconnectors to Tasmania – one failed a couple of years ago
It relies on interconnectors to South Australia
and the list goes on
And yes the new Battery in Melbourne is also unreliable It caught fire the day it was turned on
So yes I can do a calculation to prove 1+1 = 3
It does not make it true tough
Please. Someone. Go out and find Saul’s lecturers and slap them repeatedly around the ears. Do Saul as well while you are at it please.
And, we know that NSW Energy and Environment Minister, Matt Kean, is a bit of a genius too … NOT. Anybody who swallows this BS is seriously brain cell challenged.
I thought that part of Oz (NSW?) Already proved that you could not run on wind and solar if you wanted to keep the lights on. California proved that last year when hot weather hit the whole South West.
That was Southern Australia. Victoria just proved that batteries are more complicated and dangerous than Musk wants you to believe.
NSW are currently just demonstrating extraordinary general incompetence.
A sad case of run-away markjacobson disease.
The problem is that everyone knows solar panels can charge batteries and batteries using inverters can power the grid. It is the magnitude of the storage (and so the cost of that storage) required that MSM continually ignore, on the basis (I suppose) that technology is going to solve that problem real soon now. If it doesn’t the grid (on which modern society relies) will collapse.
Wind mills in his backyard, I don’t think so. hypocrite.
So finally we find true identity of WUWT’s griff.
Well at least he is honest about what this could look like.
One thing that amazes me is how many leftists are absolutely convinced they are geniuses. I guess it’s all those participation trophies.
Batteries for EV’s are extremely expensive, and all batteries have a limited number of charge and discharge cycles before they must be replaced. Why should EV owners allow use of their EV-batteries for grid storage purposes, which would reduce the lifetime of their battery? In emergency cases, maybe they would use this for their own house… Forget it.