Electrify

Saul Griffith’s visionary, practical program for a US clean energy transition

In Electrify, the MacArthur prizewinning engineer Saul Griffith offers a detailed, optimistic and urgent roadmap for a climate-respecting energy transition that we can actually accomplish in 10–15 years.

There are a lot of popular science books out there, but the world really needs more popular engineering books — books that set out the technical parameters of our problems and the various proposed solutions, sorting the likely from the plausible to the foolish, and laying out a practical range of plans to accomplish the best of them.

The first book like this I ever read was David McKay’s superb 2009 “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air,” a life-changing book that sets out the energy transition as an engineering problem.

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/04/08/sustainable-energy-without-the-hot-air-the-freakonomics-of-conservation-climate-and-energy/

McKay describes the upper and lower bounds of the Earth’s estimated carbon budget — how much CO2 we can emit. Then he looks at the energy budget for a variety of human activities — buildings, transport, food, and so on — decomposing each into a variety of subcategories. Then he looks at the maximum theoretical renewable energy generation available to…