Green energy packs big savings
Arecent book called Electrify, by Saul Griffith, looks at the cost and practicality of wiring an entire country to accommodate the change in energy from fossil fuels to renewable electricity.
We have been using fossil fuels successfully for over a century, but renewable energy is cheaper, cleaner, more readily available and, most importantly, does not produce CO2 or methane to raise the planet’s temperature.
Saul Griffith’s point is that the accountants and economists were given the task of making the changes, but one thing about accountants is that they know the price of everything but the value of nothing, and the fact climate-enhanced storms have caused $13 trillion in damage and it would cost only $4 trillion to fix it was ignored, so he suggests taking engineers’ advice on how to make the changes.
One of the central tenets is that the conversion is not a cost but an investment in the future as there are huge savings in operating costs to owning electric vehicles as well as the environmental benefits. We import $5 billion of oil a year that has a volatile price so when the price increases, as it has, it is inflationary, whereas, if we were using domestically produced renewable electricity, the price would have been stable and non-inflationary. What a boon that would have been if we had already made the change.
An important point is that machinery, such as trucks, railway engines and cars, will wear out and need replacing in the next 15 years so the simple act of replacing all new purchases with electric-powered versions will hardly add to the cost of conversion. The fact that it will be almost impossible to buy an internal combustion vehicle by 2030-35 makes it an easier decision.
Hydrogen is effectively a stored electrical energy medium and its conversion by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, storing the hydrogen to be used in a vehicle, and then using it for motive power, loses two-thirds of the energy in the process. The trick is to use surplus electricity, such as wind power produced at night, when we don’t need it, for the conversion to keep the price down.
Heat is a form of energy and there are lots of instances in manufacturing processes where using a heat pump can suck heat from something that is warm like beer and use it to heat something in another part of the process like boiling water.
His estimate is that the US and Australia need 250 per cent more renewable electricity than they have at the moment, but New Zealand is already 85 per cent renewable and so for us it would mean only about a 100 per cent increase but in the process, we improve our balance of payments by not buying foreign oil.
Each New Zealander spends about $6000 annually on energy and car repairs that could be slashed with an electric car and home-produced electricity from solar panels, so there are big savings to be made by converting.