In a March 2023 Pew Research Center survey, almost half of Americans said they felt that they were doing “too little to help reduce the effects of global climate change.” Part of what is holding people back is they are not sure what to do.
The answer is there are a lot of things you can do to help stop global warming. Some people talk about the problem with their friends. Other people go door-to-door collecting ballot-initiative signatures. There are all sorts of other things to do in between.
Here is a simple step you can commit to today. Saul Griffith, founder of Rewiring America and author of Electrify, came up with this strategy: Buy only electric. “We need to make sure that the next time every one of those machines is replaced, it’s replaced with a better electric [machine].” The idea is to not buy anything that burns gasoline or natural gas.
Let’s say you replaced your natural gas furnace yesterday. It will last about 25 years. Griffith is saying that when the time comes to replace your gas furnace, replace it with an electric heat pump. He offers this as the least you can do. Maybe your furnace is already 20 years old, and it is getting to be time for a new one. Get an electric heat pump.
Your hot water heater can last a little over 10 years. When the time comes to replace it, get an electric heat-pump hot water heater.
Living with electric heating is not bad. A total of 25% of American homes are all electric right now. You might have grown up in an all-electric home. With its cheap electricity, Washington state has a history of all-electric homes.
You probably have a gasoline-powered car. Most people still do. Griffith is saying you can drive it as far as you want. On average, American cars last about 20 years. If you bought a gasoline-powered car yesterday, you could drive it for the next 20 years. And when it’s time to buy a new one, you buy an electric car.
Not all electric cars are expensive. Right now there are three options for new electric vehicles costing under $30,000: the Chevy Bolt, Nissan Leaf, Hyunai Kona, and Mini Cooper. If you qualify for $7,500 off from the Federal Inflation Reduction Act, you could end up paying less than $20,000. Edmunds.com lists over 86 used electric cars for less than $15,000 within 25 miles of Edmonds. (When I first researched this in April, there were over 200.)
How does buying only electric stop climate change? The Environmental Protection Agency reports that over 80% of the global overheating pollution (greenhouse gasses) from the U.S. comes from extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels — gasoline, natural gas, and coal. If you buy only electric, you will no longer be burning fossil fuels in about 20 to 30 years. In about 30 years, the electricity you are using will be generated without fossil fuels too. Fossil fuel power plants are more expensive to build and run than power plants that run on solar and wind. Energy companies are already replacing them. If we all buy only electric, then everyone will have stopped burning fossil fuels by sometime around 2050. By 2050, the utilities will have replaced pretty much all their fossil-fuel powered plants, and global warming pollution will be reduced enough that the climate will pretty much stop changing.
If you want to stop global overheating faster, you don’t need to wait for your car or furnace to wear out. Replace them now. However you do this, now or later, be sure to buy only electric from now on.
What about where we’re going to get all this electricity from?
In Electrify, Saul Griffith shares the results of work that the U.S. Department of Energy commissioned on how to replace all American energy consumption with renewable energy. There are a lot of details. The short version is that we can do it and that we will do it.
All electricity-generating plants have an expected lifetime. They do not last forever. Just like cars and furnaces, they have to be replaced. Power plants were built at different times, so they are going out of commission at different times. Keeping America in electricity requires a constant turnover of shutting down old plants and starting up new ones.
The leading energy industry consultants, Lazard, report the lifetime costs per megawatt hour for different kinds of power plants. These costs include building the plant, running the plant, and shutting it down when it wears out. At a minimum, coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear plants all cost more per megawatt hour than onshore wind and utility-scale solar plants. If a utility is a for-profit organization, this is very compelling. The big idea of business is getting stuff for cheap and selling it for a profit. Lazard says the cheapest electricity is from wind and solar.
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a consortium of 12 states (including Vermont and New Hampshire), has tested this claim. Since 2009, they have been requiring utilities switch over to wind and solar. In the 13 years to 2022, consumer prices fell 4.7% and utility profits rose. Those were years when electricity costs were rising in the rest of the country. That may seem odd:
How do profits rise while the prices charged go down? The answer is they found a cheaper source: wind and solar.
Gasoline and natural gas infrastructure is like power plants: it also wears out and has to be replaced. Saul Griffith is saying that we have to replace the pumps, pipelines and refineries with solar and electric options.
There is what is called the “last 10%” problem. This is what happens on a still night. Different locations will solve that gap in different ways. In Texas, they refused to connect to either of the two electric grids that cover the rest of the continental states. The result is that their electricity is less reliable. This is proving to be a great incentive for homeowners to install home batteries. Other states can tap geothermal, tidal energy, or waterwheels for the last 10%. In Washington state, about two-thirds of our electricity comes from hydroelectric. When we are fully set up with solar and wind, covering 10% of our total electricity demand will require less than what we get from hydroelectric now.
Demand on utilities might not go up. Many families install solar on their rooftops. My family got a heat pump and we drive a plug-in hybrid that covers almost all our miles with electricity. With our solar panels, our total electricity use has gone down in spite of the electric car and an all-electric home. I hear other people have had the same experience.
So where does all this electricity come from? A lot of it comes from replacing worn-out equipment with cleaner options.
— Nick Maxwell is a Climate Reality seminar leader in Edmonds, a Rewiring America local leader, and a climate protection educator at Climate Protection Northwest.
Thank you for this timely information, NIck! In addition to caring for our climate, buying only electric offers significant health and safety benefits.
Electrifying your home ranges from relatively simple to frustratingly complex, and mistakes can be costly! The Sno-Isle Sierra Club group and the Snohomish County Chapter of the Climate Reality Project are teaming up to offer a series of presentations, “Electrify Everything in Your Home”. Our goal is to provide education and resources to simplify the planning process and to publicize information regarding excellent federal, state and local financial incentives for homeowners and renters interested in home electrification.
We’d love to have readers join us for this series. Our first presentation is Thursday, October 19th at 7 pm via Zoom. Please see our Sno-Isle Sierra Club webpage https://www.sierraclub.org/washington/sno-isle-group to register.
Nancy, Thank you for putting on this presentation!
This article goes a long way to answering the question: “What about where we’re going to get all this electricity from?” It omits another important part of the answer. SNOPUD is now rolling out meters that can charge you less when supply exceeds demand, such as when wind and solar are generating power. Consumers will be able to use smart controllers to charge cars, heat water, and set house temperatures to take advantage of lower costs. The incentives are there for consumers to do the right thing while saving money, and no mandates are needed. We can increase consumption without upgrading the power distribution infrastructure to homes.
Yes! SNOPUD is doing great work!
We have been researching making the switch from gas appliances (water heater, clothes dryer, home heating and our range) to electric. A big challenge to making the change is the capacity of the electrical panel. We have a 100- amp panel and the electrical line from the pole to our house is only rated for 100 amps. Replacing gas appliances as they require replacement with electrical appliances appears to be somewhat similar in cost. However, upgrading a panel and running power to four different locations within our house is quite an upfront cost (investment). We will research available incentives to upgrade our service…
Hi Jon, Please view this website to understand whether you truly need to upgrade your panel. It is called the WATT Diet and it shows you how to calculate the needs of all your current and proposed electrical appliances. Keep in mind that buying the most efficient heat pump, an induction stove, and heat pump water heater and dryer will not add to the load as much as less efficient electric appliances will. The WATT Diet uses the US Electrical Code requirements so it is based on good information. We were told we needed to upgrade the panel by some HVAC contractors when we didn’t need to.
Here is the calculator page: https://www.redwoodenergy.net/watt-diet-calculator
And here is a webinar that explains all the details about the Watt Diet: Home Electrification Retrofits Without Upsizing the Electric Panel – (Previously Recorded)
Go to: https://pge.docebosaas.com/learn/course/external/view/elearning/1206/home-electrification-retrofits-without-upsizing-the-electric-panel-previously-recorded
This is great information and all of it sounds reasonable and well thought out. Why does the city need to hire a Climate Action Administrator when we already have people who can tell us how to do it all; more or less for free? Plus, Nick seems to be a pretty accomplished writer, so maybe a really smart mayor or city department head would ask him for help writing climate action related grant requests and we could cut out the claimed need for another city FTE for writing grants. Boom, right there, over $300,000 saved next year.
This transition from fossil fuels to solar and wind power will be a long one, fraught with ups and downs. The oil industry will pushback with everything they got, and they got a lot.
One thing to be clear about is that once we get close to an all electric economy, it doesn’t mean that our carbon emissions problem will be over. The carbon we release today hangs in the atmosphere for 40 years, methane is for 80 years. They call it “lag time ” or being “baked into the system.”
We have still not begun to lower our Green House Gas emissions, each year we still put out more. Hopefully , soon that amount will plateau and then slowly start to decline year by year.
The quicker we can make this transition the better our planet will be. We need to do everything we can to “Go Electric” as soon as possible . That means voting in good political administrations that will hasten this transition. And it will mean that we, as individuals , must make the right choices in our consumption practices.
It is literally up to us to save our planet.
Thanks for another great climate article and for publicizing “Rewiring America.”
It all sounds good but when half the people are living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have the capital to buy a new car or upgrade their energy source or put solar on the roof the best they can do is repair and replace what they have. And to add insult to injury the government plans to make the cost of these energy sources so expensive that it will likely bankrupt half the people. While giving discounts to rich people who can afford to make the change. What are the author plans to address this problem? Where is the equity in subsidizing the rich people on the backs of the poor?
Yes Jim the cost is prohibitive for everyone, these people live in la la land. They have no idea about the cost to change to electric. The city of Edmonds charges a outrageous permit fee to the home owner for a 15 minute inspection of the work done by a licensed electrician. Upgrade to the home owners panels with breaker changes and wire runs to the location on an existing home are not for the people that don’t have disposable income. It will take many years to recoup the electrical upgrade cost. Don’t change until your appliances are worn out. My appliances lasted 34 years and now the electric upgrade quote was north of $5 grand 3 days ago, for the box work and new wire size for all electric oven and 30 amp 220 breaker in the carport. The wire runs are next to each other. Plus I changed to a heat pump and electric hot water. That was over $20 grand and more permit’s. No rebates from anyone converting from my 15 year old nice warm efficient oil heat and tank decommissioning. That’s over $25 grand without buying the appliances. That’s more than my house cost brand new, with the land.
Fred Gouge
Mr. Gouge,
Thank you for sharing the news about permit fees. Expensive permit fees do not help the process!
It’s a great easier-to-do opportunity for the City to lower these fees.
Nick why don’t you address the cap and trade carbon tax the state has imposed? Why don’t you address the car solar and other rebates given to the wealthy? All of this hurts the low income people the most is our quality of life a like being able to afford to eat a acceptable consequence for your fossil fuel free world?
So Nick, riddle me this. How do you plan to pay the salary of our planned Climate Action Administrator and lower expensive permit fees all at the same time? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for going electric when and as it makes sense and burning less fossil fuels but; I’m opposed to doing dumb expensive stuff because it makes somebody look or feel good but accomplishes little or nothing. And, I’m tired of hearing about “saving the planet.” As Bill Nye the science guy has stated, the planet is not in need of saving and will be fine. It’s the human race that needs saving and that isn’t going to happen until we start addressing the real causes of climate change which is just too damn many people trying to use too few resources and trying to over crowd into the most desirable or claimed entitled spaces. Right now evil misguided people are slitting little children’s throats over a piece of dirt to live on and what God looks like. We have a people problem, not a climate problem. Can’t solve the problem by just treating the symptom.
Nick thank you for the information this does little to no good for half the population. You either didn’t understand my concerns or deliberately ignored them, both scenarios don’t speak well of you. How can you help to develop processes/programs that help us to a better future if you can’t acknowledge the harm of current government policies on those less fortunate. Last chance my friend.
Mr Maxwell,
You missed the whole point of my comment’s. Look at the us census info on Edmonds and find how many homeowners can afford the cost of electrification of their homes. A large percentage are retired living on ssi check to check. Edmonds taxes, new utility rate increases along with food cost are out of control. You pick and choose your data reposting others and not doing your own research. As far as a rebate for auto’s, that is taxes money taken from us taxpayer and redistributed. A person single taxpayer earning $25,000 taxes for 2023 is under $1,400, look at irs.gov. A person or couple making $70,000 or so cannot afford the $25,000 to electrify their homes, buy new appliances, or buy an expensive EV. Mortgages, property taxes, income taxes, insurance, utilities, food, clothing and health insurance doesn’t leave much. Canvas your Edmonds neighbors, if you want real data, not republished brainwashing! Stop buying anything from china, India, or anything made of plastic, or other mined materials including cellphones if you are really trying to save the planet. Or are you just looking for a taxpayer funded job to push electrification.
Fred Gouge
.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the very dirty supply chain involved with EV car batteries, or the mining of the battery elements that utilizes child and slave labor. It’s great that we want to do our part locally to lower our carbon footprint, however another part of the world suffers for it. China and Africa have the poorest environment regulations, and their supplying us with those elements keeps our world dirty, in areas that can least manage their own pollution as it is. Meanwhile, here at home, those ion lithium batteries are not easily recyclable and are highly pollutive to wherever they are discarded. And finally China produces over 40% of said batteries, so we could be transferring energy dependence on the Middle East to dependence on China. Is that something that we want?
Let your conscience be your guide.
Maret Syberg,
It looks like you missed last month’s column, which included an accounting of ecological devastation. The only way that electric vehicles come out worse than gas cars is if you pretend they run on air. If you count the devastation of the oil that has to be extracted to make the gasoline that they actually run on, you see that gas cars create much more ecological devastation: https://myedmondsnews.com/2023/09/avoid-furnace-regrets/
One wonders what Californians with EVs suffering from rolling blackouts in the Summer would react to the above…
Hmm….
I don’t dispute the damage done by fossil fuel use, or that increasing reliance on sustainable electrical energy is good. What I have a problem with is the increasingly frequent presentation of electricity as a solution without any discussion of the impacts that will have. Let’s go into this with eyes open. Relying on electricity more means more batteries and wiring. That means increasing mining for copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other metals. Those are often strip mined in other countries, with significant impact on water in those places. In some countries the industry uses child labor. Electrification also means insulation on all of that wire, which is made from fossil fuels. Solar panels require glass, made from sand, also mined at a cost to ecosystems. Carbon is just one measure of man’s impact on the environment, and water is as much a concern for human survival and sustainability. Let’s not outsource our electrification to other countries, that’s the antithesis of environmental justice.
I think the responsible promotion of electrification requires candid discussion of these and other downsides, and up-front presentation of ways to mitigate them. Cars were the solution to a horse problem in big cities a century ago, now they’re the problem. We need more than 100 years from the next solution.
Jim Fairchild asked about Washington State’s program. Here is a resource about that: https://myedmondsnews.com/2023/05/climate-change-washington-states-cap-and-invest-program/
To learn more about the IRA incentives for electric cars and trucks, for solar, and other rebates, see https://www.rewiringamerica.org/app/ira-calculator
The EV tax credit for vehicles is income limited in two ways. A single person without dependents who earns over $150,000 cannot get the rebate for a new car.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/topic-b-frequently-asked-questions-about-income-and-price-limitations-for-the-new-clean-vehicle-credit
For a used car, the maximum rebate is $4,000. That’s a tax credit, so if you would not have paid $4,000 in taxes, you could only get back how much you would have paid in income taxes. If a single person earns less than $25,000 a year, they would pay less than $4,000 in taxes. Their rebate would be all of their federal income taxes.
The Rewiring America site has more information about the Federal incentives for solar, electric panel upgrades, heat pumps, and new insulation and sealing drafts.
Thank you, Jim!
The answer to tough questions is often some form of compromise that will make progress. Before Nick published this article, I talked with him for a few minutes about Plug in Hybrid cars…PHEV. He drives one and here is what I learned. 30 mile range in warm weather and 20 mile range in cold. He can charge his from zero to full in 5-7 hours using standard electrical outlets. Edmonds is less than 5 miles North to South and even less East to West. The mall and back is less than 20 miles.
A search shows a full charge is under a dollar. With the new technology PUD is installing they could offer a very low rates if we use it to charge off peak.
PHEV batteries are smaller than full EVs. Less o that bad stuff used for batteries.
Often working together, we can make progress, and all get along a bit better. Hard to do when we come to the table with our polarized views.
One of the down sides of PHEV is as we solve global warming, we will not be able to drive as far!
I like the idea of the PHEV for city-dwellers, for the reasons you list. I think the key is, solutions never were, nor will they ever be, one-size fits all. Mix the solar, wind, tidal, etc. with some fossil fuels where they’re necessary (range, carrying power, perhaps electrical insulation) and spread the load. It at least slows the negative impacts of each from accumulating.
We need to also recognize that solutions that work in urban areas won’t always work in rural areas. Someone in Index, WA can’t get to Everett for medical visits, for example, with a car that has a 30 mile max range, then requires 5 hours to charge. This is a piece of the environmental justice, in my mind.
All these climate protection goals make people feel good and I guess that’s worth something to give themselves some kind of comfort. But the fact remains that none of these Edmonds actions are going to make any difference to Global temperature changes and the science says so because of the world scale it’s so infidelity small and insignificant. Being crass, of the billions of people on this planet, approximately 75% of them don’t even use toilet paper , how the heck would they be able to afford these expensive electric conversions the whole thing is complete and utter nonsense but hey if it makes you feel good then okay. Alternatively there are a lot of pharmaceutical solutions that probably would do the same thing.