Saul Griffith’s electric plans to run a suburb off renewables | Australian Story

foreign [Music] lovely to see you again sometimes when you watch the news the scale of all the problems and issues in the world can just feel so draining and overwhelming especially during the last few years it can be easier to sometimes just switch off and binge watch some trash and eat an entire block of chocolate maybe that's just me but I can tell you something great which is that amazingly some people feel the exact opposite and thank God they do because they're the ones who get off the couch and help motivate the rest of us I bet tonight after you finish watching engineer Saul Griffith you will feel very hopeful and positive thank you so you want to short enough to show it I want to keep the dead but have it not look crazy and then just clean up the hair you don't need to take much off just um make it make me look acceptable to meet the president Paul's brain is constantly moving constantly thinking you know he wants to make the world a better place where are you from from Australia what about you I'm from Mexico Saul has this mad scientist Aura and the more you listen the more you realize that it's not mad it's him thinking on so many levels at the same time which is a really incredible thing to watch they look younger now so I was very much like a little kid in a lot of ways there's a young guy in there somewhere when you're with kids they're always dreaming and imagining what is possible and what can be done and they have little regard for obstacles or practical considerations Soul's a disrupter what he's trying to do is ensure that we're able to meet the challenges of our time I feel like an underachieving competitor sawgraphy thank you here's a guy from Wollongong literally shaping the world's approach to managing the energy transition [Music] his work has been incredibly influential at a time when we were on the cusp of passing the biggest climate bill that any legislature has ever passed I must meet my colleagues and we are then going to go together to the White House where we're meeting with the president and other people involved in the climate bill the success in the US will now be used as precedent to get that type of Bill passed in Australia Australia can actually lead the world in deploying on the ground a lot of the solutions for climate thank you we need to hit a flywheel of ambition to getting more ambition if we're going to win this oh even better the Senate has now passed the most significant Bill to fight the climate crisis ever [Music] thank you I had been living in the U.S for about 20 years 2020 rolled around covert was very restrictive and difficult in California my kids were not thriving in the school system there my parents were getting old so sort of all those things added up and said moved to Australia coming to Australia it was just a natural evolution of what he's doing I mean he just looks around wherever he is and says hey how can I fix things here foreign topics of conversation at the beaches around here is isn't the water a little bit too warm for this kind of year Ali character was in Australia that had done amazing work in the USA some local parents came to me in this head is there something better we can do for more near-term climate action all of this High political policy never works at Community level and I said well why don't we see if we can organize our own Community to become Australia's first all-electric zero Mission community and we can even maybe get some help from the state government federal government we all just slept straight on and said great that is like we can do that for honestly what would be the First Community in the world to really come in most of us are parents and we're all really committed to pragmatic solutions to The Climate crisis Communications and protocols to work with the grid the general population would like some optimism they would like to know what can we actually do one really obvious way to get to zero emissions in households is to Electrify all of our machines that currently burn fossil fuels and then to produce all of the electricity for those machines with Renewables Saul is a compulsive Optimist which I think is why he is able to do this work but he's not the kind of optimist who says oh technology will solve all our problems you know he's saying we can solve this if we all work together foreign we didn't grow up anyway fancy [Music] grew up in the southern suburbs of Sydney and it was my sister and I hi Mom hi Mom my mum was an artist I learned from my mother a genuine appreciation of art of architecture of the natural world whenever we got a chance for school holidays we'd pack up the car and we go camping it was very much a nature-based environment I would never tolerate children who said that they were bored if you dare say you're bored you must do something useful with your time and Saul was never bored he always found projects to do dad is an engineer and academic enjoyed fiddling and tinkering and Engineering on weekends there's still resolving who lost the Allen keys in 1995 and I'm pretty sure it was him I want to swear into misplaced tools from my father uh I also learned from him to not fear any machine Rhonda the Honda we inherited this car with a condom on his exhaust pipe when I was 15 and it was the project by which I avoided studying vhsc so we basically pull it apart and put it all back together again I remember pulling into pieces and you coming home and telling me I did it all wrong maybe but we managed to get it back together and it ran when it was finished that little wreck looked brand new [Music] we had a Fearless approach to anything in my childhood that was broken we just like oh we'd fix it or if we needed a thing that didn't exist we'd make it a bit trite to say that learning how a Car Works is important but if you approach it and deal with the science and the engineering involved he he learned a lot oh I love that sound I think it took me 30 years to realize that very very few kids had that experience my worry for the world is like we're just taking spare time away from parents and there's less creativity and less imagining in households than ever before you know it's 8 43 in the morning you got to get the kids to school by 9 15 and then lunches aren't made how are we going to solve climate change today it's like [ __ ] a guy called Saul Griffith confesses to being one of those types who observes the world with a Keen Eye and then gets his buzz out of tinkering with it it's all nice to meet you good to see you nice to meet you George [Music] I first studied metallurgical engineering at the University of New South Wales then I bummed around the world for a little while came back and started an advanced degree at Sydney but while I was there I got accepted on scholarship to go to Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT is such an extraordinary place I mean it's a gathering of all the the nerdiest Nerds it was my first experience of an education environment where everyone loved being there because it was making them realize their dreams your motivation is not purely technological or scientific even it's humanitarian yeah is it a driving force yeah a lot of projects I work on are focused on reaching out to a lot of people and having a big impact what do you do for relaxation I build these very large inflatable Kites and then I will use those to propel ourselves across ice across water why am I not surprised I have basically everything in my life I build myself nyt was good for me and did well for me one nice thing I got the MIT student prize for invention for the past six years now Saul has studied and worked in the US where his recent tinkerings and one of my thirty thousand dollar prize I will cry while I tell you this story I had an idea like childhood but it was not all perfect it's you know you know everyone has some struggles and my mother had breast cancer three times when I was a kid I think the first time I was probably 11 or 12. he came to me very concerned one day instead of you going to die mum she said don't worry I'm not gonna die I haven't been to the Galapagos yet so when I won money later because I used to always remember that that's where she wanted to go my mum cried more than me no actually she'll say that she never cried she really is difficult [Music] I met Alan on Halloween 2001 she was an undergraduate student from Harvard she told me that on our first date that she wanted to have children that were like me and then she remembers being like whoa that means I have to marry someone like that I remember one of our first weekends together we met up in Florida and the thing that really got across what a unique mind he had was we were sitting on the dock looking out at the Sunset and I said oh what are you thinking of and he said well I was thinking that if we lived on a planet with different rules of gravity I could hold you out over the water so that you could dip your toes in the way that I'm doing so you could experience this amazing ocean you know because he has longer legs I thought oh that's not what I was thinking [Music] early on I just thought I will never be bored with this guy and I never am sometimes I would like to be slightly more bored [Music] team Anderson I'm Eric Wilhelm I'm Soul Griffith from squid Labs we have the capacity to make home over the summer of 2004 myself and three colleagues from MIT moved to San Francisco to start squid Labs all right great squid Labs really was a bucket of ideas that paid enough of a salary for us to figure out what we were doing and then create very focused startups I was the most interested in energy and Climate Technologies we could see all of the ecological crises that we're now experiencing coming you know as the engineer well what do we do to fix this we have still have an energy crisis and now we have a climate crisis as well if you're at all like me this is what you do with this sunny summer weekends in San Francisco and you realize that there is incredible power in the wind and that can do amazing things and at the time solar and wind were much more expensive than coal and gas so how do you make them much much much cheaper so this is the dawn of the new age of kites they are of course all new intuitively from kitesurfing that there's more wind higher up and so they thought instead of having windmills which you can only go to a certain height they thought a lot of you had a kite on a tether and then you could fly it as high as you needed to get the the wind up there it's very ambitious but that's never been Saul's issue luckily we found early money from Google to get started on that and then the 2008 financial crisis hit and there was sort of differing ideas about how to tackle it um and where the money was going to come from to continue it and Saul ended up stepping down right as we had our our first child so we literally had a newborn and Saul didn't have a job and he decided that he was going to start a new company how the lab started on Earth Day 2009 a bunch of young engineers and product developers work here trying to make new technology it's a pretty magical place like you know we have enough of the right tools to build a satellite by Monday if that's what you need the way I've described Saul in other lab is to ask people to imagine what it would be like to visit Willy Wonka in his Chocolate Factory I'm not sure that all of the elves put their tools away this morning or to visit maybe Thomas Edison in his Labs so in here we have a tour room lathe which is my spiritual because there's some mix of sort of Fantastical Whimsical fun and there's also very serious science and engineering happening I'm really glad to see that we are using the physics of elephant ears to develop the future of air conditioning someone once asked me what Innovation is and I it was flippant at the time but I think it's kind of what I believe now like what is innovation I'm like it's free pizza and an unsupervised Workshop I'm extraordinarily proud of what we achieved with love lab we've got all sorts of projects here energy storage Technologies this is the guts of an autonomous drone for inspecting offshore wind turbines some Innovations in rooftop solar over about a dozen years more than 50 patents we've started a dozen technology companies mostly in energy coupling robotics so this is actually components for a nexoskeleton which is a robot that you can wear saw has always worked with his hands I think that was where he initially tried to solve climate change he's very aware of the clock ticking before we got married I said to Alwyn as you know half as a joke you know if by 2020 the world hasn't made sufficient progress on climate change can I become an eco-terrorist and she said no I said well what about if you start trying to you know working behind the scenes in politics try to influence the policy and the laws and and public opinion What's it gonna take to get our president really fully on board with this in 2019 my friend Alex Lasky and I started rewiring America we need to show that tackling this challenge does not involve sacrifice and pain fall and Alex both have experience with Silicon Valley where billions of dollars get you know tossed around and I think they thought well you know if you can do that for an app let's do it for the planet you know for as long as the country has existed people have been heeding their homes by burning first wood than coal then oil and now gas I had been interested in energy flows forever and I convinced the department of energy to fund us to do a study mapping in the greatest detail all of the energy flows from the supply side to oil platforms coal mines gas pads all the way to the machines at the end so your toasters and your cars and your ovens and your air conditioners I think looking at all the data was when he realized how important electrification was by Saul's count 42 percent of all emissions in the U.S economy come down to decisions that are made in everybody's homes we have to change the way we heat our homes and heat the water in our homes Etc by replacing those fossil burning machines with Efficient Electric machines that are powered by renewable energy we have to get 50 reductions by 2030 to stay on target for a climate Target we want so we need it's go time for the stuff that works and if we do all of that as fast as we can we buy ourselves enough time for the big science funding to come in and create the solutions for steel for long distance air travel for agriculture because they're not ready yet I was just a political naive I thought that politicians write policy I learned really quickly that a lot of policy is drafted by lobbyists and so we had to become a Lobby group that could write policy based on science and data that is what was required to then take on the gas industry in the oil industry and then we just relentlessly fought the science-based argument for an the Regulatory and policy reforms required to become less [Music] it's very concrete the next time you buy a stove it has to be electric so you're not burning natural gas anymore the neck the next time you buy a water heater or a space heater they have to be electric not natural gas the next time you do your roof you have to put solar [Music] as the new White House came in they had an ambitious climate team we've got a seat at the table in figuring out what the climate policy would look like these machines they're relatively expensive to buy but cheap to run so we had to come up with some new Financial ideas for how the government could help households an enormous amount of the work that rewiring America did ended up in the uh in the climate Bill things like rebates are at the center of that legislation the U.S Senate has approved a sweeping 620 billion dollar climate tax and health care package took 18 months it did finally get through and it got through maybe predictably by the narrowest of margins vice president Kamala Harris cast the deciding vote the bill authorizes the larger since I got to Congress in 2009. if I had to go back a couple of years and say could we get something at the scale done it would really be hard to say yes I felt like it was the single most meaningful thing that I had ever been a part of we want that up the fossil fuel Lobby is not going to disappear and so there's a lot of work still to do in spite of this great Victory so we have to be able to change the situation so that in the future we're not going to need those fossil fuels to run our economy it's a huge political victory was it enough no that like on day one when we were asked how much is it going to cost we did the math and with like you know two to four trillion and we got less than that half a trillion so it's not quite enough but it's um certainly a great start [Applause] this is the beginning it's been exhausting to get here but now you know we gotta now's time for the hard work wait wait wait for the ladybug there we go [Applause] in late 2020 we decamped from San Francisco and moved to the northern suburbs of Wollongong [Applause] pretty much as soon as we had moved here Saul jumped into trying to translate rewiring America into something like rewiring Australia Saul's been consumed with this topic pretty much the entire time I've known him but um certainly I'm sorry I mean it's uh the issue of our Times Really um it's been really exciting to be here and feel like there's an appetite for change so have the vid for fully electrified suburb we all just did great let's make it here our group's called Electrify two five one five that's the postcode of the community where we all live we started by looking for about 500 people who would be up for converting all their homes appliances to Electric Alternatives and powering them using solar and batteries on their house we put a website together pretty quickly the race is on to create Australia's first electric suburb soon households in the 2515 could have the opportunity to join a generously subsidized program [Music] the house doesn't have a gas connection so we started electric and we've gotten more Electric we've got a beautiful sunny roof so we've got 10 kilowatts of solar installed we switched into positive territory with the amount of energy we use so you weren't paying nothing the only two things we don't have are we don't have an electric vehicle and we don't have a battery the cost on them is coming down all right yeah this is um an induction cooktop you have probably seen one before thought I was going to miss gas cooking I don't it's really fast it literally boils a pot of water faster than a gas stove top [Music] the wonderful thing about the volunteers of 2515 is they've been out of sort of guide and run this local experiment which has enabled me to spend the majority of my time focusing on the politics of the issue off the camera this morning at the invitation in David pocock to address a whole bunch of our members of the house and senators we have buried the use of fossil fuels into regulations and policies everywhere and if we wish to undo that you have to engage with politicians because we now have to move very very very very quickly to get those fossil fuels out of the system faster in fact than the free market can do Saul is an inventor author and founder of multiple companies and non-profits most recently he's founded rewiring Australia because Australia has done so good on rooftop solar the economics are extraordinary so if we use our cheap sunshine to drive our cars and hear our homes we're going to save money sooner can the government invent financing systems here that will make sure that every Australian can be backed by the government to buy these high Capital Electric machines so that they can save money over the lifetime at the moment we're spending just under 12 billion dollars a year subsidizing fossil fuels in Australia at the same time Saul's modeling shows that 12 billion dollars over five years would help Electrify every Australian household thank you very much hopefully I didn't go too far over time [Applause] okay so we're moving on to events organization an update so Ali's going to give us an update on the venue it's at the at the Thoreau Community Center our group gets together every two weeks or so usually plenty of room for standing so people have got kids all that sort of stuff yeah I don't know we went into this having absolutely no idea if we were going to get 10 people willing to kind of take part and we got 500 people within four days and so we're good we're planning a community Forum to help kind of raise awareness of the real Concepts behind it Trent and I are currently working on some graphics at the moment based around the six appliances and then the cost comparison between you know the electric version and the fossil fuel version so the real aim of the campaign is to get as many people as we can to prove out how this can work at you know a power grid level um but also we want to be able to show the nation that this works so with this one is the hot water it's just wonderful to see local action and I think lasting political action actually starts to happen when you can make it sort of bottom up happen from the community Soul thank you again for coming here so Lara and myself are part of the Electrify 25 5 team got a lot of climate despair uh but when I came across seoul's concepts of widespread electrification I didn't just feel a sense of hope it's something that also gives the power to individuals and to communities to create change all right without further Ado fellow 251 Fiverr and the spark who ignited uh program every time Saul gets in front of the room you can feel everyone and have a lot of fresh energy for oh this is this is a good idea isn't it I've been talking about climate energy and electrification for about 20 years all over the world to all sorts of audiences and this is the most intimidating one by far because you're my neighbors and if we screw up you know you literally know where I live so excited when he moved back to a city to reclaim for the country I reckon and that's the type of follow-up so I'm a local Wollongong City councilor I'm 100 open to this because this is a community-led initiative why wouldn't you support a community but wants to go out on their own and do this The Upfront cost of doing all of these things at once is high and it's definitely out of the reach of most Australian households and that's why we need to get a subsidy for this campaign to bring a lot of that forward doing everything first requires money and we're asking our community to take a risk so we're actually looking for about 29 in funding from a bunch of different sources that Keene is the treasurer and the energy Minister it's uh so he's kind of a double whammy in New South Wales and also he's been a very strong advocate for what we have to do so we are targeting his office with proposals the community in 2515 been extraordinary they've actually raised interest 1500 households which want to sign up and join an electrification pilot I think every developed economy around the world is having this exact conversation how are we going to power our economies but do it in a way that's going to protect our planet if you could Electrify the entire household today in Australia and power it with solar and put half of it in the battery that's their ongoing cost of energy so then you can see saving forty two thousand dollars that's the in the 10 years after they do it they save 42 Grand the interesting thing is there's a big upfront capital investment but the benefit is accrued over the years because effectively they're getting zero cost electricity it might end up being about three thousand dollars a year for the household after they've bought things and they're paying it off look I I want a pilot like this Pilots are really important because it's providing a proof of concept so it can debunk the criticisms of the naysayers then you know once you get it right in the pilot then you can scale it more broadly it was very hard to be optimistic 10 or 15 years ago because there weren't enough of the technological pieces in place [Music] now thanks to progress in science and engineering and scale you can pretty much narrate the solution by which we solve climate change it is a race to the Finish now and it always will be I think especially having our kids has made him really think about the things that can be done to give them a livable future you know I think Saul has had his Doom and Gloom moments but over time you know you either get lost in the Doom and Gloom or you think about how you can make things better oh I'm gonna take back the last move one genuine source of optimism is this opportunity for Community Renewal we know that it's got to be communities that do this work together it doesn't solve your check problem every single Australian is connected to every other Australian through our electricity Network like it's literally the wires that bind us together [Music] [Music] [Music] all right [Music]

2023-03-01 10:39

Other news