Absolutely Electrifying - Ep158: Saul Griffith

ML  0:10  

Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich, and this is Cleaning Up. In every plausible scenario for a low carbon future, even those produced by oil and gas companies, electrification grows substantially from just over 20% of final energy use now to dominating the energy system. My guest this week has been a standard bearer for the idea that to get to net zero, we have to, in his words, "electrify everything." Let's meet engineer, inventor, advisor, author and 2007 MacArthur Genius, Soul Griffith.

ML  0:48  

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ML  1:49  

So Saul, thanks very much for joining us here on Cleaning Up.

SG  1:54  

Thanks for having me, should be fun.

ML  1:57  

So we always start with our guests describing themselves, the short version, please because you've done so much. But the short version, the one liner on who you are, what you do.

SG  2:09  

I grew up basically destined to be an engineer, trained in metallurgy and worked in a blast furnace as my first job. Went to MIT, did a PhD in physics-type things and then spent the last 25 years building energy technology companies in Silicon Valley. And in my most recent career move, founded Rewiring America, Rewiring Australia and now Rewiring New Zealand as well, which are advocacy groups for the electrification of everything and trying to speed up this energy transition.

ML  2:45  

Very good. And for those who are listening on the podcast, they will not see it, but those who are watching on YouTube would be able to see over my left shoulder there is your book, which is called Electrify. There we go. So we can give your book... we can give your book a plug. Get it?

SG  3:07  

I like that. It gave me a charge when you said that. Just also a couple of books I've written since then one called The Big Switch. Unfortunately, I only have the Chinese translation on me, and a long essay on community electrification and its role in economic renewal.

ML  3:32  

Okay, so let's recap. We've already set off at a canter. Let's recap. So you have an engineering and science, hard science and engineering background. You've been an inventor, you're very proud of that, that's in your your bio, you're always called the engineer and inventor. But you're also a writer and an activist for electrification. So let's take that as a starting point: why electrification?

SG  4:00  

I became deeply fascinated in energy systems in the early 2000s. And was trying to understand what we knew about the energy system and what you could use that knowledge for in terms of decarbonisation. That led studying all the energy flows in the US and the global economy at an unprecedented resolution, if you like, and that's really the topic of the book, Electrify. And really, as you look at all of the energy flows, whether it's energy that's going to be used in an abattoir or energy that's going to be used on a school bus or energy that's going to be used in people's homes and you think, okay, how do we do that service, that energy service but do it in a way where there's no decarbonisation? Our really only practical decarbonisation technique for nearly all of those energy flows is electrification. So that's why the book was called Electrify and why I'm trying to break through into the policy and the regulatory environment to simplify what we need to do for climate, because I think there's still a lot of governments in the world and a lot of bureaucrats who are a little bit confused by loud misinformation on what might decarbonize yet really 75-80% of the heavy lifting on climate change is going to be electrification.

ML  5:22  

Okay, now, your book has got in it, some fantastic diagrams. Some of the people listening to this will know what a Sankey diagram is, and some who might not.

SG  5:33  

I love all of you, all three of you.

ML  5:35  

All three of you who know all three of you who don't What do you reckon? What's the ratio?

SG  5:39  

Well, maybe on your show it's a few 100 who know Sankeys and that makes me really happy.

ML  5:44  

I think on my show, I'm gonna go with 60% having some vague idea what a Sankey diagram is. But why don't you explain what is a Sankey diagram?

SG  5:56  

A Sankey diagram was named for Captain Phineas Riall Sankey, who was looking at the energy flows of coal through to propulsion of a steam powered ship that he had at the turn of the century. And you could see in that a huge amount of the burned coal would go off in one of the flows as waste energy because you just lose it as heat and then a small amount of it would become tractive power for the boat. And that's the first known use of the term Sankey associated with diagram. It became popular in the 70s as a way to understand energy flows at the moment in history when the world first turned its attention to energy problems because of the energy crisis of the 1970s. And since then, every year, the US Department of Energy and also Lawrence Livermore Laboratory publish, you know, if you're an energy wonk, I'm sure you know it, the annual energy Sankey diagram. But it's pretty low resolution, just looks like how much energy goes to industry, how much to transportation, how much to residential sector. And I did a fairly ridiculous project to look down— we tried to track energy flows down to about 0.1% of flow through the US economy. So literally be able to identify the refrigerators and the school buses and the energy used in other things like how much energy is used to process natural gas for example.

ML  7:28  

And just for those who are trying to visualise this — and what we'll do is in the YouTube version, if you can provide some of your favourite Sankey diagrams, some of the ones from the book will cut them we'll edit them into the YouTube but of course, I'll have to just do a bit of performative dance here for those... or verbal performative dance. There we go, that's what they look like. But for those who are listening to the podcast, I'll do verbal performative dance. If you remember everybody, the famous chart that showed how many troops Napoleon started with... 400,000 troops started in France and went over to Moscow. And at every point, every battle, every disease, was losing troops and eventually came back with I believe, 10,000. And that famous visual graphic, it wasn't called a Sankey, because Mr. Phineas — whatever his name was — Sankey hadn't done the steam engine. But it's that sort of a chart that shows where you start with stuff and where you end with stuff. Now, people who listen to lots of my shows and read my stuff will know that I am— I have an obsessive hatred for primary energy. But these charts they will start on the left with primary energy, don't they? What's wrong with that?

SG  8:47  

There's a lot of things wrong with it. I think we are struggling with our— with an honest conversation about climate solutions, starting with how we understand energy. So primary energy traditionally is the measure of you know, tonnes of coal, 1000s of cubic feet of natural gas, barrels of oil. In the 70s, for the first time, we had to figure out well, how do you put hydroelectricity in primary energy? How do you put nuclear power in primary energy? And so this actually was the first introduction of errors into how we think about primary energy because the way the Department of Energy defined hydroelectricity as primary energy was: if there's no rain and the dams fail, how much coal plant do you need to put on to substitute for the hydroelectricity? So what that led to, because of the inefficiency of coal, was a tripling overreporting of the amount of hydroelectricity. Then of course, because you only get about 1% of the primary energy out of uranium when you do traditional fission reactors, they didn't use the primary energy in the uranium at all, they threw it out and they just use the heat value or, in fact, the primary energy is the electricity you get out minus the inefficiency of the steam cycle in the nuclear power plant. Because otherwise it would have made the whole chart ridiculous. And because of those definitional problems, this is probably the best news we'll get tonight, the primary energy is over reported by about 7 or 8%. So we need 7 or 8% less energy than you think just from a beginning. Of course, what we really care about is useful energy, which is on the far right hand side of the Sankey diagram. So from primary energy that goes into sectors traditionally, and those sectors were defined, like we said earlier industry, residential, commercial transportation and electricity, which is considered it's own special sector unusually. And then you start to think, well, what happens underneath that residential sector? Well, that's where we heat our homes, and we cook our dinners, and we turn our lights on, and we play video games. And the transportation sector is everything from air travel to ferries, to cars, to trains —  mostly cars. And industry is very confusing in itself. For example, all of the mining of fossil fuels energy goes under industry, all of the processing. So 3 or 4% of US energy is using oil to process oil into gasoline and diesel. About 1% of US energy flow, which counts under industry, is using natural gas to push natural gas through about 1.2 million miles of pipeline. So actually, about 10% of the energy used in the US is processing and transporting fuels. So that also makes starting with primary energy not a very easy way to understand the system. I'm still in a little bit of a fight with the people at Lawrence Livermore, who published one of the Sankeys, they were critical that I came out and said America, if all electrified would only need 42% of the primary energy that they think they do. And that's without using any of the traditional efficiency measures that people sign up for. So efficiency measures are insulating your house, driving a smaller car, eat like a vegetarian, those are traditional efficiency things, the last one is dietary. But if you merely drove electric cars — the same oversized size that American cars are — and if you merely heated their oversized homes with heat pumps, and did all the things sensibly and electrically, you could in fact, run the entire economy — thinking, I think, in the way you'd like to think about it from the demand side, or where we use the energy — using only about 42% of the primary energy that we think we use.

ML  12:50  

Right, and one of the last episodes of Cleaning Up was the second part of a two parter, I gave first the reasons we should be pessimistic about the transition, which was the five horsemen of the transition. And then I did the five superheroes of the transition. And the fifth and final superhero, was what I call the primary energy demand fallacy. And that is that we have to replace this thing called primary energy demand. Now, you just described the way that Lawrence Livermore, and I think the US Energy Information Administration, does this adjustment for hydro and wind and solar kind of multiplies by about three to make it say, "well, this is what it would require in coal to replace them." But the IEA, the International Energy Agency, does not do that. So when they talk about primary energy demand, they add a whole bunch of coal that you shovel out of the mines. And they add that to just the electricity that's produced by solar, and wind and hydro. So it's even more distortive. Because what you've got is not only do you have all the wrong numbers, because you count the waste heat from the thermal from coal and oil. But you also then massively underestimate the impact of those technologies that just produce electricity rather than waste heat. So I go into this: Number five, the primary energy demand fallacy, and I give a few examples for how you can get the same amount of lighting with something like 95% lower primary energy demand if you have an LED light bulb, powered by solar power, and the figures for transport and heating are about 75% Lower. So you've averaged and there's some different numbers, different methodologies, but you came up with this figure 42 percent that we're only trying to replace 42% of the US definition of primary energy, correct?

SG  15:10  

Yeah, and 42 is a little bit more accurate than I really mean, but it is the result of if you look at every one of the 100 flows that we looked at. If we use more heat pumps, it'll be a little bit less if we use fewer heat pumps, it'll be a little bit more. Very likely the lowest cost pathway for the energy transition is to have an oversupply of wind and solar. Putting more in than you need is cheaper than storage in many applications. So how are we going to report the oversupply and the over install? So there's a lot of problems with trying to square to this primary energy system methodology, which was written into stone in the 70s, first by the EIA, then by the IEA, and cut and paste. And every government in the world is still using that terminology and still looking at the problem wrong.

ML  16:05  

The question I love to ask people who come up with primary energy, and they talk about it is exactly what question does it answer? So you've got this metric of primary energy, or primary energy demand, as it's called by the IEA. What question does it answer? Because in the 1970s, it answered a very simple question. We've got this economy over here, and we need to shovel resources into it, have we got enough basic resources? But the problem today is very different. The problem today is: we've got some energy services we need, how do we fulfil them cleanly? And I just don't know how primary energy of any sort answers that question.

SG  16:44  

I think it's a case of we measured the thing that was most easily measurable, and the thing that was most easily measurable by economists: barrels of oil. So a lot of these statistics come from trade statistics. You have to remember that the IEA was originally an oil and gas cartel. And so they've been very strongly interested in using the language of those fuels that they represented. So I think the EIA and the IEA, for different reasons, have a blind spot for thinking about it in terms of useful energy at the end of the line. So I think I violently agree with you — we're not looking at the problem right. We still have most governments in the world trying efficiency measures. So think about the 1970s, it was an oil crisis in the US, they were missing 15% of primary energy because of the Arab oil embargo. They very quickly did Project Independence — how do we become energy independent? And there were two thrusts to that. One try to figure out how to make more oil and gas and they were even considering, believe it or not, using nuclear warheads for fracking, that was one of the projects that they funded in the 70s. But they really arrived at, in a policy response efficiency, because if you made every oil boiler 15% more efficient, every car 15% more efficient, that would give you those efficiency wins. That gave us the CAFE, corporate average fuel economy, standards. That gave us the Energy Star appliances. So that was the policy response. And we still recommend and in fact, there's still that terrible 2008 McKinsey paper that told everyone that the cheapest thing you could do was efficiency, but this is really not true. If you take your average house, it doesn't really matter where you are, it will be a $20-30,000 quite inconvenient retrofit to put insulation everywhere. And a few thousand dollars to put in a heat pump which will lower the heat energy need by a factor of three. So I think it has also led us to be chasing efficiency where it's not always the fastest nor the most economic choice.

ML  19:12  

So I have something of a running battle with this point about the heat pump versus the fabric improvement because there's this thing called fabric first, which started as a kind of cute mantra, but it's become almost a religion. And I've now invented a hashtag #fabriclast. Not because I don't like energy efficiency, not because I don't like loft insulation or wall cavity insulation or better windows. But because the moment you say energy first, as you say you're unleashing this kind of £20-30-40,000 very disruptive project as a condition of installing a heat pump, which it's not. And so #fabriclast is my way of promoting a kind of discussion and a debate and get people riled up so they actually tried to think about it. But many of them don't. For them, they just think it's an outrageously sort of counterproductive of me to say this.

SG  20:07  

Well, I remember my good friend David MacKay, sadly he has left this world. And he  always said, the most efficient heating system is an electric blanket. And he's true, just very locally heat you. But sure it's a little bit too prescriptive, I think, for everyone in the population. You probably don't know this about me, my father was a textiles engineer, so I grew up around textiles and we actually made like a polar fleece lofting fabric that would change its insulation with temperature. So as it got colder, it would be warmer, and as it got warmer, it would be cooler. So we were trying a little bit of not fabric first, but fabric at least making a contribution. But you know, honestly, your summary is right, we should meet people where they are. And we should recognise where the huge efficiency win actually is. And that's in electrification.

ML  21:03  

I was gonna say, so you wrote this book about electric blankets called Electrify. Sorry, those who are on the podcast won't see I'm smiling broadly. But talk about how do we electrify? We've talked a little bit about heat pumps.... Electric vehicles... Now, in your book, they seem to be a universal good, you just state we need to electrify vehicles. But that's a controversial statement. Partly controversial, I suspect, because some people are raising all sorts of objections for entirely venal reasons. But how good are electric vehicles?

SG  21:42  

I should say we could solve climate change... this is what doesn't come across in the summary of the book, and I couldn't quite write this in the book, there's a little... the end chapter has it. We could now solve climate change yet still destroy all of the species that we share the planet with. I think there was, at one point, there was 1.2 million Tesla's cyber trucks pre sold. They weigh close to three metric tonnes each, if you multiplied one by the other, they would weigh as much as all wild mammal life or half as much as all of the wild mammal life on Earth.

ML  22:21  

Right, but they're made of rocks. No, I mean, I think they're a horrible, ugly, appalling thing. And, and I'm not gonna...

SG  22:21  

I agree, they're made of rocks. And there's enough of the rocks. But you know, what is the number one killer of birds in the world? It's being struck by a vehicle. So I think are cars a universal good? No, our cars kind of amazing? Yes. Are electric cars are much, much more amazing than internal combustion engine cars? Yes, all of these things can be true. I have some sympathy that we should elect to use some other forms of transport, you know. America is going to try and solve climate change with electric four by fours and pickup trucks. That isn't the cheapest way, but it is a very American way.

ML  23:14  

Let's go through the other big chunk is industry. How do you electrify all of industry? Because, you know, I do think and I've been doing this for about 20 years, the electrical grid or the electrical system is going clean, right? We know how to do that and it's progressing well. Transportation, electric vehicles, obviously, we always have to say, but of course, it's better to walk and cycle and take public transport. But they're there. We've talked about heating, but the next big chunk is industry. And how do you get that to go electric?

SG  23:54  

Well, some of the industries already are so aluminium which is a very useful metal, is made through electrochemistry and electrolytically. And we can just clean up the electricity supply and pretty much have green aluminium, except there is some carbon dioxide from burning the electrode. But there are processes now where that electrode doesn't have to be carbon. So we have pathways to green aluminium. The other big offenders in industry? Well, a huge amount is all the energy used to process, find, mine and refine fossil fuels. So we eliminate all of that by moving to zero carbon electrification. Pretty much that leaves food and agriculture, steel, cement, and a couple of other very small contributors as the last big contributors. I think steel is, depending on who's counting 6, 7 or 8% of global emissions and concrete is 6, 7 or 8 or 9%, and agriculture again, depending who's counting, is 10 to 20.

ML  24:59  

You've got things like glass, you've got ceramics, you've got a lot of high temperature processes, which currently use a lot of... possibly coal in China, but basically gas.

SG  25:11  

Right, so a lot of them, you'll be able to heat inductively. For some of the glasses, you might need hydrogen or you could use biogas. In the US, if you collected all of the waste food, all of the waste sewerage, all of the waste agricultural biomass, and waste forestry biomass, that would create about 10% of the US primary energy in an oil equivalent, or a gas equivalent. So you probably don't need that much to do all of the high heat in industry. Steelmaking, for example... you use hydrogen a little bit for the reductant, but also a little bit for the high heat, but there are completely electrochemical pathways to steelmaking as well. The reality is that we don't have the answers for industry commercially available today at scale. This means for countries that are writing policy... countries are typically concerned when they write policy about job creation, and then industries lobby the government's very hard. So they're very noisy about "we want discounts for industry to decarbonize." But if you're prioritising the earliest emission reductions you can, because that's what we must do, early emission reductions count more, we would be focused in the next decade on electric vehicles and electrification of building heat. Honestly, what we're really doing is praying that that decade gives us enough time to dot the Is and cross the Ts and bring up to scale those industries that are still challenging.

ML  26:48  

But when you say, we'll hope and we'll dot the Is and cross the Ts, if you've got a process that requires heat, and it's currently using gas... just on an energy content basis, sort of dollars per therm, or BTU or kilowatt hour, electricity would have to be... If you've got the US, let's call it $3 per million BTUs. BTU is a British thermal unit. Dollars per million BTUs is how gas tends to trade around the world, but certainly in the US. And the price, I think at the moment is actually under two. But the metric I know is if it's $3, you need $10 a megawatt electricity to replace it. $10 per megawatt, that's one cent per kilowatt hour. And it has to be reliable electricity for a lot of these processes. High temperature processes don't like running intermittently. So when are we going to get $10 per megawatt hour, one cent per kilowatt hour, dispatchable 24/7 365 clean electricity?

SG  27:58  

I don't think we will. I think you're thinking about the problem in the right way. I was just pulling up a spreadsheet I've been working on this week, which is trying to track the price of all of the different fuels from what you would call the supply side all the way through to the demand view. So a barrel of oil... You know the marginal cost of production of Saudi oil is nine US dollars a barrel, which is two tenths of one cent per kilowatt hour equivalent. Natural gas, like you said, wellhead gas at $250 per 1000 cubic feet is again, a quarter of one penny per kilowatt hour equivalent. Even if they are burned very inefficiently it's still under a penny. The only way you will get electricity that cheap, and I'm living in Australia currently, is when you have overproduction... and so the price of electricity is now negative in Australia most days for multiple hours. So I can imagine a future... So the the conversation in Australia isn't how do we get to 100% renewable, it's are we going to be 300, 600 or 900% renewable? How much of that excess renewable energy will use for industry and exports. But once you have more than 100%, which is what you need for 100% reliability, so you need more than 100% capacity for 100% reliability, you will have long periods of the year, and long periods of every day, where the price of electricity is negative if you are close enough to it — meaning you're not paying the transmission costs and the distribution costs which are actually what dominate in the real price of electricity. So then you can start to imagine provided, and you've said it well, if you have capital and industrial processes that can run intermittently, I can imagine a future where you get competitive with that natural gas price. But if you're still designing your processes to run 24/7, then that won't be true. But you have to remember that we designed a lot of industrial processes to absorb overnight coal. So a lot of night shifts are actually a product of having coal as a dominant source in your electricity sector, because you can't shut it down overnight so you have very, very low cost overnight. So we might, in fact, solve a lot of these industrial problems: A, through over supply, which will give you zero marginal cost of electricity, and B, changing the shift schedules in the same way that we changed them in the 20th century to shift towards where coal was cheapest.

ML  30:37  

So there's a short little sentence or couple of sentences in your book, which are rather endearing, where you admit that you're not the best macroeconomist, and you say that there are other people much better at macroeconomics.

SG  30:53  

I've been brushing up.

ML  30:56  

I have indeed, I've read your book...

SG  30:59  

No, I've been brushing up on my macroeconomics.

ML  31:01  

Oh you've been brushing up? Yes, I've been brushing up on you. You've been brushing up maybe on economics, but this idea that... because you're confusing price and cost there, aren't you? That oversupply, somebody has to pay for it. So you know, maybe that it's a cross-subsidy between the retail consumer and industry or something. But I know investors, and if you tell them, "you're going to build an enormous amount of oversupply. And you're going to do it to serve the ceramics, the glass, the smelting the etc, etc, industry. And by the way, they're not going to pay you for that power." I can tell you, the investors I know, they're going to say, "I don't think so."

SG  31:49  

This is what investors are already doing, so I think you're wrong. They just don't know how to express what is going on. So they're investing gobsmacking amounts of capital in industrial wind and industrial solar, and a huge amount of that is destined to be cast off as natively priced electricity. But the whole net price of the project will level out at some mel-CoE of 3-7 cents a kilowatt hour. But what you said is actually right. really, and I think about this a little bit more in the terms of the Australian economy right now than the American economy or others, because Australia is ahead of this curve compared to most countries because we have 35% penetration of rooftop solar so that that creates negatively price electricity at two o'clock every afternoon. But the consumer will pay an awful lot for the wee hours when there is no wind and there is no sun, that they are those consumers will actually be providing industry with zero marginal cost energy when we're at the peak. So the levelized cost. So if you financed rooftop solar in Australia, which is installing on the rooftop at about 55 US cents per watt, think about that it's a one quarter or 1/5 of the price that is installing in the US that is delivering electricity at two or three US cents per kilowatt hour behind the metre to the Australian household. You add batteries at six or $700 a kilowatt hour to do 5000 cycles to that. And you've got hardened electricity at 10 or 15 cents, half the price of what the grid delivers. This is the world we're entering. That's a not a technological win in Australia, but a regulatory win. And our sunshine is good, but it's not twice as good as America. But you can see those types of you know, Britain will eventually have more wind than it can consume because of the massive deployment of offshore wind. And that will change the dynamics of industrial energy pricing.

ML  34:03  

Right. But when you say that investors are already putting money to work, not on the rooftop stuff, but on these big projects, the answer is they're being paid whether that resource runs or not, right? We've already got hundreds of millions of pounds of curtailment payments, because we've already got more wind. We've got something like 12 gigawatts of offshore wind, we're supposed to go to 50 gigawatts by 2030. I mean, we won't make it but we'll get close. And we're already having, you know, extended periods where there's too much wind and then, of course, the problem with cold countries is that the principal resource is wind, which doesn't just fall away overnight. It can fall away for weeks and months and you can have bad years…

SG  34:50  

I’m quite familiar with wind, having started two wind energy companies, and I agree. It isn't easy, but you know… if you want the honest answer and this is why we are a little bit hoping and praying. There is no... I do not know anyone who can predict nuclear, solar, wind or hydroelectricity coming in delivered to the furnace equivalent price of natural gas. So, those products price has to go up, or you have to win the efficiency through electrification, which is possible unless it's a purely heat process like glass where it's just you know, electricity is not going to be more efficient than burning gas for glass. So some products, the price will go up.

ML  34:50  

Right. And I think where we're going with this, by the way, is policy responses. Because I agree with you, at the moment, it's all very well to say, well, wind is going to be cheap, solar is going to be cheap, but there's going to be these things that it doesn't do. And you can say, well let's wait 10 years and dot the Is and cross the Ts. But realistically, you've just said it, you've said the quiet part out loud, some things are just going to cost more, which means that there's got to be a policy response, not just to help push down some costs. But a policy response that says, if you don't want — even in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years — if you don't want people burning gas to make glass, or ceramics, or the heat part of the cement emissions, you're just going to have to close a cost gap. And you have to do it, of course, not just in Australia, which has got plenty of money, or the UK or the US with plenty of money, you have to do it in Malaysia and in South Africa and in Indonesia, and across Africa. And so everywhere in the world is going to have to just pay more, is that not correct?

SG  36:54  

Net net, I think everywhere in the world will pay less. And I will defend that statement. But most places, the world will have to pay a little bit more for a few things. All of the glassmaking and ceramic making of the world is a 1% type of problem, just so we can bound it. And I'm now going to violently agree with you that we are actually having a conversation about policy response. And I think I'm about to lose a drink to you because I'm going to say unfortunately, most of the policy responses I see around industry around the world is hydrogen. The only good hydrogen, of course, is green hydrogen, which means you have to start with zero emission electricity, which means wind or solar or nuclear. But unfortunately, as you go into it, hydrogen is just a battery. It's not an energy source, you're going to lose at least a quarter more likely 30 or 40% of your electricity when you create the hydrogen, you'll lose another 10% of it, compressing it, you'll lose a few percent in transporting it and then you'll lose a small amount up to 50% when you burn it again. So hydrogen as a policy response for industry necessitates at least five to 10 times the price of gas for the equivalent industrial heat. Yet all of the world's governments are addicted to the idea of hydrogen. Part of that has to do with the IEA. The IEA, again, started as a fossil fuel cabal; where does all the hydrogen in the world come from? It comes from the gas industry. They've been very, very loud advocates. They, in fact, predicted that 50% of the world's primary energy would be in hydrogen in 2050, a few years ago, the most ridiculous, like... if you didn't lose respect for their modelling after that, I don't know what would do it for you. And really a lot of the work I do now is fighting that, because money spent on hydrogen now as an industrial sponsor is not money decarbonizing in the short term, and it's not going to end up being the decarbonizing technology in the long term, bar a few industries where it is the only option such as ammonia and fertiliser.

ML  39:05  

So for those listeners and viewers who sort of spotted the reference to the drink, but didn't know what it referred to, in preparation for the conversation, I said, "Here's hydrogen bingo," which I play in a lot of meetings. "The first person to use the word hydrogen has to buy the drinks that evening." And so Saul has now officially lost hydrogen bingo.

SG  39:29  

But I want to return to the important point. I modelled today... So if you model an Australian household in 2024, they use 104 kilowatt hours of all types of energy use, the majority of it is petrol and diesel or gasoline. About 20% of that is waste heat, lost burning coal or gas to make the electricity. If you electrified everything in that household, it would only need about 37 kilowatt hours per day. So that's less than 40% of the primary, and primary energy I'm using air quotes because I agree with you, it's not perfect as a measure. But that's an extraordinary efficiency win. Now if you provided that, and the average Australian house quite easily can supply 1/3 to 2/3 of all of their annual energy with solar. So if they're using 50% with solar energy, and they're getting the other 50% from the grid, paying full price grid prices, they would save about $3-4,000 per year on their total cost of energy. It actually means — and this is why I've been brushing up on my macroeconomics because I now make arguments to government about the most efficient policy response — if you take the microeconomics of that household that can save money through financing the electrification. So we're going to bookmark that word financing, because it's incredibly important to your question about Malaysia. But if Australia electrified all of the 37 million machines that households own that currently run on fossil fuels, and they did them at the rate at which they retire. So if you have a 10 year old Volvo, in five years it'll kick the bucket, replace it with an electric car; if your furnace is eight years old, replace it in four years etc. We would save $1.7 trillion as a nation by 2050 by replacing these machines as fast as they fail with electrified machines. Why is that a better picture in Australia, we've had the regulatory win on rooftop solar that makes it extremely cheap, although we're not cheaper than Indonesia, China or Mexico on rooftop solar installations, so that is something available to most of the world. Our retail natural gas and our retail petrol and diesel is about 50% more expensive than America, maybe equivalent to Britain. And our electricity... you know, and we have a mild climate. So we've got sort of a perfect setup. And probably one of the first countries in the world where that statement, at least for a huge part of the retail energy economy, which happens at residential and commercial buildings.... it's now a slam dunk, economic win for a nation to go all in behind financing everyone to electrify everything. And you save that $1.7 trillion. Do I think that $1.7 trillion will offset the marginal extra cost we would have to pay for industrial heat that has to come from something other than natural gas? Yes, I think it's a net win. You could now... and the economics has flipped in New Zealand in the same way it has in Australia. The economics... I haven't done the analysis for Indonesia or Malaysia or Vietnam, but at the rate that they're installing solar and adopting electric motorcycles and three wheelers, it is almost certainly true there. But you could probably draw a map of the world based on what is their retail oil and gas prices, and what is their renewable installed cost? And actually say, "Well, this is the rate at which all of these countries will get to decarbonisation." I think America is probably 5 or 10 years behind because it hasn't had the regulatory win on solar and it has such profoundly cheap oil and gas. England is further behind, but for you, it's because of your challenging climactic conditions. Nevertheless, the cost curves of the solar and the wind and the batteries that enable this are on track, so that it's fairly difficult to imagine any country that doesn't get there, to this sort of economic turning point, by the mid 2030s. Granted, Northern Europe and high population density countries in Asia probably have to have some nuclear in the mix to make it work.

ML  43:52  

Yeah, I think that's right. I like the way you've laid it out. It's not just England, that's going to have the problem. I think Northern Europe, sort of dense population, industrialised and with you know, winters... so I have solar on my roof in London, it has to be east-west because of the way the roof is. And it produces 1/13 as much energy during the winter — at the trough of the winter — as it does during the summer. So you know, any idea that I'm going to be heating my house using solar.... and of course, wind really can fall away for extended periods. So Japan is going to find it hard. Korea's going to find it hard. Europe's going to find it hard. And then depending on how interconnected they are places like New England in the US is going to find it hard; Canada, it's going to be very hard to get Canada off fossil given how cheap and how abundant that fossil is and how cold they are. So that's going to be a real tough one.

SG  44:51  

But you said it interconnection is extremely important. Some of this can be solved with geographic diversity. So over 1,000 kilometre scales it's always windy somewhere, and every 1,000 kilometres you go south or north towards the equator, you have... By the way, you can hear a coal train passing by my house, so that's my personal motivation to get the world off coal. But it is hard to imagine a solution that doesn't involve moving electricity over 1,000s of kilometres north and south.

ML  45:35  

So Saul I'm an investor in something called Xlinks, which is from Morocco to the UK. And that is of course, a north-south 3,800 kilometres high voltage DC subsea cable that I think is actually going to happen. But of course, if you then say, "what is 3,800 kilometres east west?" You actually get from the UK or certainly from Ireland, to the PJM electricity market in the US. And east-west helps with time differences; north-south helps a lot with resource differences.

SG  46:10  

Yeah, the hardest, the hardest hour of the day in Australia is the East Coast evening, which is exactly when Perth has its best wind and its best solar. And you know, with a 4,000 kilometre link east-west across Australia, we would make the problem much easier.

ML  46:28  

So I want to come back to a couple of things that you mentioned. One is just to kind of finish off on hydrogen since you're buying drinks. And that is there are these huge figures that have been proposed for the proportion of primary energy — to use that horrible construct — that will go into making hydrogen as you say, IEA, I think at one point had 50%. 15% now seems to be a sort of consensus of the great and good. My own figure, and I suspect yours as well, is going to be 1 or 2% It's really just going to be for the very, very difficult stuff. So do you agree with that? Because then if it costs a lot, it's very small so it doesn't really matter in the net-net grand scheme of things.

SG  47:14  

I lower bounded it 1 to 2%, which is pretty much just doing equivalent amounts of ammonia for fertiliser that we currently do. And it might be as high as 5% depending upon what we get for steel and what we get for cement.

ML  47:31  

I agree entirely with that I was when I was saying 1 to 2, I was thinking more in the energy system rather than as the current feedstock uses. So it's kind of current use of a couple of percent, plus maybe a couple of percent more.

SG  47:43  

Yeah.

ML  47:44  

The other thing I wanted to just note or let you comment on is this idea that you retire things when they require retirement, at the end of their asset lives. So you talked about the the 10 year old Volvo, I have a 16 year old Volvo. And I can guarantee you I will not be buying another internal combustion vehicle, but I'm not going to get rid of it until there's an equivalent vehicle, and I am fully fully depreciated and the embodied carbon of my existing Volvo is fully used up.

SG  48:16  

I think there's a small chance that you'll buy a mid 80s Volvo station waggon and electrify it just for nostalgia. That's my strategy right now. I think I just bought myself for my 50th birthday a 1974 Alfa Romeo that's going to get a Ford electric crate motor conversion. But to return to the question, which I think is something I think about a lot. So in corners of the climate universe, there's something known as committed emissions. So whether it's a coal plant, or whether it's a cement factory, or whether it's your 16-year old Volvo, it still has a certain number of years in the case of your Volvo, maybe four more years of an expected lifetime of 20 years. And so it is committed to emitting for another four years you're driving. So is an old blast furnace that's got another 10 years on the line etc. I think there was a paper in 2020, which means that the numbers are worse now. But the committed emissions of the world's machines took us to 1.8 degrees, I think, around 2020. This is going... I'm going to tie a few thoughts, so hold that thought in your mind. We let the IPCC process — after the scientists do the very good climate science work it goes to sort of economists and modellers for how do you respond and what are the emission reduction trajectories? And in the mid 2000s, they discovered bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, with an unfortunate name, BECCS is the acronym. And they thought they could have a negative emission energy source. So you burn the biomass and then you capture the carbon dioxide and bury it and nominally that's a negative emissions. Greta Thunberg summarises this most brilliantly when she says, you know, you adults of just use accounting tricks to try and solve climate change. We put in 20 gigatonnes of negative emissions at the end of this century in the majority of pathways for 1.5 degrees. Now, let me put 20 gigatons in perspective for the audience. All of the oil, all of the coal, all of the gas that we pull out of the Earth every year weighs about 10 gigatons. So by necessity, we now want to bury twice as much stuff as the entirety of all fossil fuel industries combined, and build that industry for, mind you, a negatively price product by the end of the century. It is never going to happen. So this means that we actually have to go, if you want 1.5 degrees, and you believe that the committed emissions are 1.8, you have to have not just perfect execution of replacing these machines at retirement, but you need to go faster than the market can. And if are a free market ideologue, you have to wrestle with the fact that the free market can't give you a climate outcome of 1.5 degrees. So you need stimulus and things that go faster than that. And you really need to set the schedule for any human who you know, as a friend: "Oh, you know, I think you should electrify." And then they say: "Oh, but I can't afford it this year." And you say, "Well, when your 16 year old Volvo dies in four years, then you should get the electric car, when your water heater packs it in in 10 years, then you get the heat pump water heater, when your stove packs it in or you do a kitchen remodel, then you should put the induction stove in." And that's what we need everyone in the world to think about as they think about their personal response to climate change. Now, a lot of the IRA in the US that I worked on with colleagues from all over the place, including the team we had at Rewiring America, we focused very much on how do you write policy and stimulus that helps make those decisions very, very easy. Whereas I like to think that 50 years of environmental wisdom, which is reduce, reuse, recycle, efficiency, that's going to save the dolphins. But that just gives you incapacitating consumer guilt when you're in the supermarket, because you can't read enough of the labels on the cereal box to know which one is better. Whereas the great majority of emissions in your personal life come from six decisions. Is your car electric. Do you have solar on your roof. Do you cook with electricity? Do you heat your water electricity? Do you heat your house with electricity? And so what we need people to do is...

ML  52:54  

And the sixth one presumably being to fly on holiday.

SG  52:58  

Didn't mention that one. I can't remember what the sixth is, I think it's the big five, they have the big five in Africa. So it's the big five of electrification. But we need people to sort of start being on this mantra.

ML  53:07  

The sixth is then flying to Africa to see the big five.

SG  53:10  

Yeah, which we're going to have to do on biofuels because hydrogen is not a great idea for aircraft either.

ML  53:17  

But your point about retiring things at the end of life actually resonates with me. I was on the UK's Energy Efficiency Task Force. And I actually chaired the piece on industrial energy efficiency before it got nixed. The government did this reset, the climate change reset, and actually got rid of the task force, which was a huge shame, I think. But one of the ideas that I was promoting through that platform was the idea of a living will for your heating system. And of course, you could apply it also to industrial heating systems or industrial systems. So when you're heating packs up, you know beforehand how you're going to instal a heat pump, rather than your heating packs up, you're cold, you're under stress, your kids are screaming, you can't have a shower. And of course, what you do is you put it in another boiler. So if you have a living will for your system, then you would do what you're saying we need to do, which is: at that point, which is the lowest cost intervention, rather than scrapping a stranded asset early, just at that point, make the switch.

SG  54:27  

You're speaking my language, and as policy responses, you now have to acknowledge that 40% of water heaters are bought under financial duress. It's the middle of winter, your partner is pregnant or your mother is sick. And you call a contractor or a tradesperson to replace your water heater and they're going to sell against the heat pump because what they have in the back of the truck is a gas thing and they know how to do that job. So we've got workforce issues. And then of course, even though the heat pump cost of ownership over the lifetime is very likely much lower than the gas, people make these decisions based on cash. And you know, in the US famously — what is it? — the average house has $400 or 40% of households only have $400 cash on hand. So most people don't have the credit facility available. This brings us back to the bookmark, we had much, much earlier about finance, right? In Western countries, if you're in... As I like to say, the most expensive Range Rover in Australia costs you $256,000. You could instead buy a $20,000, 20-kilowatt solar system, you could buy the heat pump, the water heater, the electric stove, do the same for your second house, buy batteries and the whole thing... You'd still have $100,000 leftover to send the kids to private school. But that's only available to the people who are buying Range Rovers. How do you decarbonize the people in the lower 50 percentiles, the bottom half. And it's extremely important. And really, it's a finance issue, because, like that point I made earlier, the economics is now good over the lifetime of these products. But the economics is very difficult in cash up front, especially if you have poor credit rating, or you're single mother between jobs. All of these issues are really where we're going to fail. Or you're in Malaysia and your government can't print money the way America can.

ML  56:23  

Right, because all of this is... All clean energy, I think pretty much all of it, maybe not biofuels or biosolutions, but everything else is a huge amount of spending up front for no fuel costs. So whether it's nuclear — nuclear has a fuel costs but it's still massive upfront — but solar is upfront, wind is upfront, energy efficiency is upfront, public transport is up front. Insulation... it's all up front.

SG  56:49  

You're buying 20 years of energy in advance.

ML  56:52  

Right. So it becomes then, and in your book, you've written about how the solution is cheap mortgages and it's about finance. Now, the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act in the US didn't go down the direction of saying, "Well, let's just give people 1% or 2%, or 3% loans to do the right thing. It works through basically tax incentives, you get a tax break. So by definition it's only going to help certain people.

SG  57:23  

Yes, this was a problem with the IRA. But it was handicapped politically, because the Democrats didn't have a supermajority in the Senate, and they weren't prepared to overturn the filibuster. So the only political option for a climate bill was a spending bill. So it's not legislation so much as a spending bill. And that meant, really, that everyone was working on these other bigger fancier ideas, but it became, "okay, how do you hack the tax code to achieve the effects?" By definition, as you've pointed out, it is a regressive piece of policy because you have to afford to pay enough tax to qualify.

ML  57:54  

So what's the alternative then? Because in your book, I think you lay it out, you say it's all about mortgages and loans. But isn't that going to be enormously inflationary, you're basically going to give cheap money to a whole bunch of people with poor credit ratings. They'll do something which is good for the planet and for sustainability. But you are pouring money, globally, in the trillions, into a system that is essentially not equipped to deal with it. And you're going to have a huge, huge macroeconomic... I hope in your getting up to speed on macro economics, you've figured out how to deal with the inflationary surge that will result.

SG  58:35  

I'm writing a paper with the chief economist of the central bank in New Zealand at the moment. And the title is, "Is electrification anti-inflationary?" And for Australia and New Zealand, it is anti-inflationary, and think about it, because instead of spending $7,000 a year a household on buying fuels, you could spend about $2,000 on the finance for the full electrification kit. But that $2,000 is now fixed 20 years into the future, because you put it on finance. Fixed modulo, the indexation of your loan rate. Whereas the fossil fuels have enormous volatility, and they've actually over the last 25 years been increasing at a rate higher than the CPI. So literally, fossil fuels define inflation, whereas there's this anti-inflationary effect of finance because it takes all the volatility out, and it locks in your cost of future energy at what you're financing at now. I can show you graphs and charts that we've looked at this. And there are serious economists now thinking about this. And it is not clear that it is inflationary.

ML  59:48  

Okay, so I've got a suggestion for the title, your title. What was the title that you said for the paper you're writing?

SG  59:55  

"Is electrification anti inflationary?"

ML  59:58  

How about calling it "How to finance the transition" or "How to finance the electrification." So I just found this in a bookshop, those who are listening to the podcast, it's called 'How to Pay for the War." And it's by the great economist, John Maynard Keynes. And he would completely disagree with this voodoo finance, voodoo economics that you've just come up with. Because when you pull forwards a whole chunk of economic activity and funding really there...

SG  1:00:29  

I'm reading "The Price of Peace" right now and I think Keynes would be on board.

ML  1:00:33  

So what he said is if you wanted to finance all of the economic activity around the war, you need to raise a war bond. So you need to suck out demand from the economy elsewhere in order to finance the surge of activity? And that seems I mean...  it's a pretty useful and interesting analogy.

SG  1:00:51  

No, I don't think that's the right way to think about it. So I'm going to use the Australian case, because I'm modelling this right now for the Australian government as a potential policy response. There are 11 million households, those 11 million households will spend, by 2050, around about $2 trillion buying cars, buying water heaters, buying space heaters and buying kitchen cooktops. If you look at the cost curves of electric vehicles, the cost goes at heat pumps... Hang on, hold on...

ML  1:01:25  

But you're jumping to the easy bit, which is wherewhere the solution is cheaper... the clean solution is cheaper in CapEx terms than the dirty solution, right? But the problem is that doesn't tend across the the economy.

SG  1:01:38  

Yes, but we need to take advantage of those pieces of the economy where it does exist. And that is 75% of the economy, which is the commercial and the residential and the transportation sectors. So it's the lion's share, okay. And like I said, we have to buy ourselves 10 years to get steel right. There is a chance that steel becomes cheaper if we have a Boston Metals fully electrochemistry pathway, right? But we need to buy ourselves some time, I'm not trying to put that in the too hard basket, I'm trying to raise the urgency on what we know how to do. And I'm trying to focus the mind that this is no longer a technology problem. This is a regulatory problem. This is a financing problem. This is a supply chain challenge. And this is a workforce development challenge. Every country in the world is short tens or hundreds of thousands of electricians and skilled trades people to install all these things. And, you know, to finish my sentence, if we spent $2.1 trillion instead of $2 trillion over that same period, you would have all electric kit and you would save $1.7 trillion. So the net benefit far outweighs the small, what we call, green premium. Now, granted, like I said earlier, Australia is there first for structural reasons, but most of the middle of the planet is already there. Central Asia, Africa, etcetera. So there's large swaths of the planet where this makes economic sense right now. Unfortunately, there are a lot of countries that have terrible access to finance. So we need something of a revolution in finance, and we need the new thinkers to go above and beyond Keynes to figure out how we do this.

ML  1:03:29  

Saul let me just come in here. I think you'll overtrading Australia, right? Because here you've got this country that's got enormous amounts of savings through the super funds, you've got loads of solar, you've got wind, you've got iron ore, you've got gas, you've got... So basically, you're saying, "Oh, we're gonna do this in Australia, and it'll pay for itself and fantastic." But I would flip it around and say, "Well, if you can't manage it in Australia, then we're really screwed elsewhere." Because you've got everything lined up in Australia in a way that actually, frankly, almost no other country in the world has.

SG  1:04:05  

I think you're right, we're absolutely screwed if you can't do this in Australia, but you have to do this type of very large effort somewhere first, and I think Australia and New Zealand look good. If you think about it a bit more broadly, any country that doesn't produce its own oil, because the best energy price arbitrage of all is electricity versus retail gasoline or petrol. So I think the Australian price is $2.50 a litre is about 90 cents a kilowatt hour equivalent. So you make all your money against oil. So countries that don't produce their own oil are very likely ones that find out that this is a very good idea first. Australia imports $50 billion a year in oil, so that you can make that go away and run on $5 billion worth of renewables So there's only really about six serious oil producers. I think this is why America will struggle with this more than most, because they still are close to being able to make of cheap oil. But I think that means that there's a lot of countries... and for example, China is way ahead of its targets on electrification deploying renewables, partly because it is trying to wean itself off the fossil fuels that are expensive.

ML  1:05:25  

Right, but okay. So we do a two by two matrix, and we've got countries with low interest rates that are oil importers, and it's basically Australia and China. And it's hard to think of that many others actually no, I suppose you've got Northern Europe and so on. Japan, Korea... No, I kind of like it. But you've also got something else going on in Australia. You've got all those natural resources, you've got this incredible amount of money in people's savings. And you can fund it all by exporting fossil fuels, which is what your plan is. Uour government's plan is fundamentally, maybe to become virtuous in Australia but...

SG  1:06:07  

We're just following your Norwegian footsteps there, let's be honest.

ML  1:06:11  

Well, you're not following, you're actually leading because if you go all the way back to the Kyoto Protocol, even Norway said, "Yes, it applies to us." And Australia essentially said, "No, it doesn't apply to us," in the last minute, "Count us out."

SG  1:06:25  

The reductive version of your argument is that you can't save the world because you're trying to do business not as usual. And yes, we are agreeing that Australia is a bit unusual, it can go first. But we're not going to find a solution for climate under two degrees unless the majority of countries figure out how we're going to do this financialisation of the energy system. Because the switch from fossil fuels to electrification is from fuels to finance. So there's no getting around this being the problem. And no, I don't believe that any country in the world has the instruments to get it right. And, you know, I'm putting in some effort here, putting in some effort in other countries, trying to figure it out. But we need to figure that out and it will be new instruments. And if it's going to spread to, as you put it, to some of the countries that struggle, for structural reasons, to have cheap access to international finance, we're going to have to invent new systems, we're going to have to go beyond Bretton Woods and America's dominance of the global finance to get there.

ML  1:07:32  

And does that not just mean giving money away though?

SG  1:07:37  

Why is it giving money away? No, I haven't said give money away anywhere. I said, finance, which we all understand that finance is money that you pay back.

ML  1:07:46  

But if there's a risk premium to invest in Africa, or to invest in some of these countries, because they are risky. And if you say, "Oh, you've got to stop America's dominance of the financial system." That's a very easy thing to say. But if it means not earning the risk premium on countries that are risky, than it is giving money away.

SG  1:08:07  

I know that a family of four in Kenya has 110 cc motorbike as their family car. It's about a $1,400 motorbike. We're approaching having an electric motorbike equivalent power-equivalent performance, that with the solar cells that would power that will come in under that $1,400. And at the microeconomics of that household, I'm not sure that presents any more risks than what they're doing currently.

ML  1:08:40  

No but that's... First of all, you've immediately jumped to a solution, which is cheaper than the dirty solution, which is, of course, the easy stuff. But even so if...

SG  1:08:48  

We're having a conversation, about the easy stuff tonight in order to have a conversation about the hard thing, which is finance. Because we could get distracted in industry all night. But you know, it's debating when you think we will have electrochemistry for steel and what we're going to do about cement. Whereas, you know, my urgency is buying us the time to get to those solutions by doing the things that we know how to do that will present a macroeconomic argument that it's going to save families, countries and regions money to do it.

ML  1:09:25  

So we had an episode with Professor Avinash Persaud, who was proposing the Bridgetown Initiative, and that's all about closing the financing gap between sort of it's fine if you've got 5% financed in Australia or the UK or the US or Europe, Japan or Korea. But of course, if you're in South Africa, even where you've got 15% cost of finance, or you know some other countries are in...

SG  1:09:51  

Oh, you're dead in the the water if your finance is that bad.

ML  1:09:54  

The funny thing is, he framed the question absolutely brilliantly, but then failed to come up, to my mind, with convincing answers. Now, we've reached that point in the conversation where two engineers are having an argument about macro economics. So I think we're probably done, we'll need to continue the conversation over that hydrogen drink, which you have promised to buy me. Next time you jump in your biofuel powered plane to come up to Europe or I end up down in Australia. I would love to take you up on that offer. But it's been really wonderful talking to you.

SG  1:10:31  

It has been fabulous. I think we could go on about macroeconomics. Honestly we know as much as the economists do.

ML  1:10:39  

Well, I think that's the point the macroeconomic nobody can actually prove anything right or wrong, because it's just this kind of social science.

SG  1:10:45  

It does look like it's a religious debate when you get to the level of, you know, Keynes versus Hayek, for example.

ML  1:10:54  

Well, I haven't I haven't been able to channel Hayek and know what he thinks about climate change. I think in Hayek's world, there are no such things as environmental externalities. I'm not sure if he's got to that. Now, I'm probably going to get the comments fields filled on all social media. And hopefully, somebody will point out what Hayek did think about the environment. I know that Ayn Rand certainly never had any clue that there were any externalities. So anyway, fabulous talking to you. And to be continued.

SG  1:11:24  

Thank you, thank you to your audience. Hopefully, there's a young economist out there who's going to turn this into a good idea.

ML  1:11:32  

I'll go with that. Thanks very much, Saul.

ML  1:11:33  

So that was Saul Griffith, engineer, inventor, advisor, author, and evangelist for electrifying everything. As always, we've put into the show notes links to the episodes and resources mentioned in our conversation. So that Saul's 2021 book, Electrify, and The Big Switch, published in 2022, as well as The Wires that Bind, which sounds dodgy, but is in fact his 2023 essay on community electrification. We've included a link to Episode 145 of Cleaning Up in which I talked to Bridgetown initiator Professor Avinash Persaud about how to close the funding gap for climate solutions in the Global South. And finally, the second part of my two part essay for BloombergNEF, entitled "Net-zero Will be Harder Than you Think, and Easier," in which I described the five superheroes of the transition, of which the fifth is, of course, the primary energy demand fallacy, as well as its audio adaptation, which was Cleaning Up Audio Blog Number 12. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please remember to like, share, and subscribe to Cleaning Up or leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform. And do please spread the word. Tell your friends and colleagues. Cleaning Up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, as well as by the Liebreich Foundation, the Gilardini Foundation, and our newest supporter, EcoPragma Capital.