Energy & Stuff

$46bN per year: What Australia squanders on gas revenues would easily decarbonize (and educate) us.

Saul Griffith — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:34:20 GMT

My librarian wife really hates people annotating books in pen. A friend sent me these annotations of my book Plug In! (pages 221 and 222) and I have to say, pen or not, it tickled me.

They posted about it and the post went viral. People asked them to fact check. So here I go…

It’s even worse than it was when I wrote that a couple of years ago.

The good news, sort of, is that since Verrender's piece in 2022, the Albanese government's 90% PRRT (Petroleum Resource Rent Tax) deductions cap has lifted PRRT collections from sub-A$100 million to A$1.48 billion in FY2023-24. So the literal $100M-vs-$32B framing in the book is now closer to A$1.5B vs A$56B, which is "only" a 38× gap rather than 320×. Progress.

The bad news is that on every other measure I checked, the giveaway has gotten worse. We are exporting more LNG (about 81 million tonnes in 2023, up from ~75 Mt at the time of the book). The price spike of 2022–23 widened the absolute dollars Australia is leaving on the table — Qatar's hydrocarbon revenue rose to about US$36 billion (A$56 billion). The PRRT credit overhang has grown to roughly A$238 billion, meaning even the reformed PRRT cannot recover Qatar-comparable revenue inside a decade.

Three months after the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, Environment Minister Murray Watt approved a 45-year extension of Woodside's North West Shelf LNG plant out to 2070. And the methane-leakage measurements that have come back from independent surveys of our own gas fields look meaningfully worse than the figures we submit to the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

In 2023 Australia and Qatar both shipped roughly 80 million tonnes of LNG — close enough to identical that the two countries swap places at the top of the global league table depending on the month. The export receipts at the dock were also similar: about A$85 billion each.

What the two governments collected from that resource flow was not similar at all.

Qatar's government took home an estimated A$56 billion.

Australia's federal and state governments combined took home A$10.6 billion. Once you net out the fuel tax credits the gas industry receives back from Australian taxpayers, the figure shrinks to about A$9.6 billion.

Same gas. Same buyers. Same Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies and ConocoPhillips operating both ends of the pipeline. Qatar collects 5.8 times as much from a near-identical resource as we do.

This is not a story about Qatar charging dramatically higher rates. It is a story about Australia having built a tax regime that allows the gas industry to become (in the polite phrasing of the Australian Taxation Office) a "systemic non-payer."

It is also the second half of a story I told a couple of weeks ago about our oil sector — the one where we export 94% of our crude to Singapore and buy the refined product back at a markup. The gas version is worse, because we don't even get the export dollars Norway and Qatar do. We are simultaneously a major LNG exporter, an importer of refined fuel, a country whose east coast is told it is "running out of gas," and a country whose taxpayers underwrite the diesel that powers the gas industry's own trucks. This is not a strategy. It is four mutually contradictory positions held simultaneously by people who appear to think nobody is looking.

The paradox: we sell our gas cheap, and pay premium to buy it back

The most absurd feature of Australian gas policy is the bit voters have actually noticed: at the same time as we are the world's largest or second-largest LNG exporter — about 81 million tonnes of the stuff in 2023 — our own East Coast manufacturers and households are paying some of the highest gas prices in the OECD, and AEMO publishes a near-annual warning that Victoria is heading into a winter shortfall.

Three things explain this. First, virtually every molecule of East Coast gas production is contractually committed to LNG export. The three Curtis Island trains in Gladstone — Queensland Curtis LNG, Australia Pacific LNG, Gladstone LNG — were sized larger than East Coast demand on day one. They were always going to vacuum the southern fields dry. Second, there is no domestic gas reservation policy on the East Coast. Western Australia has had one since 2006 — 15% of LNG project gas is reserved for the WA market, which is why Perth households pay roughly half of what Melbourne households pay for the same molecule. The East Coast got the export terminals and none of the protection.

Third, the federal government's response to the inevitable shortfall has been to permit more LNG export, not less domestic burn. The May 2024 Future Gas Strategy explicitly committed Australia to gas extraction "to 2050 and beyond." Three months after the Iran war in June 2025, Minister Watt approved a 45-year extension of Woodside's North West Shelf LNG plant out to 2070. Browse, Scarborough's Pluto Train 2, Beetaloo, Barossa, Narrabri, and Surat are queued up behind.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. About 75% of the gas Australia produces is exported as LNG. About 25% is consumed domestically. Of that 25%, the largest single end use is electricity generation — gas peaker plants — which we are in the middle of replacing with batteries and renewables. The second largest is industrial process heat, almost all of which a heat pump or electric resistive heater can deliver tomorrow at lower cost. The third largest is residential — about 5 million Australian households still cook and heat with gas, the majority of them in Victoria, where the Andrews and now Allan governments have legislated a phased exit.

So we export three-quarters of our gas, charge ourselves premium prices for the remaining quarter, and the actual reason we "need" any of it domestically is policy inertia and the gas distribution networks' need to recover their fixed costs from a shrinking customer base. Take an honest look at the demand side and Australia would not need to import a single MMBtu of LNG to be entirely off domestic gas inside fifteen years. The export volume could continue, the domestic problem could be solved, and the only loser is the gas distribution network operators — most of whom are owned by foreign infrastructure funds anyway.

How Qatar collects its rent

Qatar runs a three-layer system, and every layer is structurally hard to avoid.

Layer one — a value-based royalty of around 20% on LNG output, levied at the wellhead before any clever accounting can erode the base.

Layer two — a 35% corporate income tax on the foreign-owned share of every joint venture.

Layer three, and most importantly — the state itself owns the equity. QatarEnergy holds majority stakes (50–100%) in nearly every LNG project, including the new North Field expansion where it sits at 75% with Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Eni and ConocoPhillips splitting the remaining quarter. What the royalty does not capture, the dividend does. The IMF's 2024 Article IV reported that Qatar's hydrocarbon sector contributed about 83% of total government revenue in 2023, with LNG-attributable revenue alone reaching around USD 36 billion.

Per unit of gas, Qatar's government takes USD 8.60 per MMBtu — about USD 447 per tonne — or roughly 67% of export value. Australia's governments take USD 1.61 per MMBtu, about USD 84 per tonne, or 12% of export value. Asian contract LNG sat in the USD 12–16/MMBtu range in 2023, so Qatar is keeping more than half of the wellhead-to-FOB margin as sovereign revenue while we keep a low single-digit percentage. This is not Norway-grade sovereign rent management. It's a mismanaged yard sale.

How Australia doesn't

Our regime looks comparable on paper. There is a 10% federal royalty. There is the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT) at a 40% rate on super-profits. There is corporate income tax at 30%. The combined gas industry kicks in around A$16 billion across all instruments. But three structural features mean almost none of that revenue actually attaches to LNG export value.

Most Australian LNG is royalty-free. The 10% federal royalty applies only to the North West Shelf project. The four other major offshore LNG projects in Commonwealth waters — Gorgon, Wheatstone, Pluto, Ichthys, Prelude — pay no royalty at all. About 56% of Australian LNG exports leave on a royalty-free basis. Imagine if every iron ore mine in the Pilbara except the original Tom Price pit paid no royalty. We would, correctly, set fire to Parliament House. For LNG, we shrug.

The PRRT was designed for a different industry. The PRRT was built in 1988 for an oil sector that no longer exists, and it taxes super-profits calculated after every project expense and uplift has been deducted. Treasury's own 2023 budget paper acknowledged that "not a single LNG project has paid any PRRT and many are not expected to pay significant amounts of PRRT until the 2030s." The Albanese government's 90% deductions cap, in force from July 2023, finally produced revenue: total PRRT collections across all 16 entities reached A$1.48 billion in FY2023-24. To put that in perspective: the Commonwealth collected more in beer excise from Australian drinkers than it did in PRRT from the entire LNG industry. Pocock has been quoting this line in the Senate for two years and the government still hasn't picked up the rope.

The industry sits on roughly A$238 billion in accumulated PRRT credits, which means even an aggressively reformed PRRT cannot deliver Qatar-comparable revenue inside a decade.

Five of the largest LNG operators paid no corporate income tax across most of the 2015–2022 period, largely through intra-company debt structures that shifted profits offshore. The ATO's "systemic non-payer" line was about these companies. They are not even pretending to participate in the country's tax base.

"Gas is a transition fuel" is a marketing slogan, not a fact

The gas industry's second-favourite line — after "investment certainty" — is that LNG is a "transition fuel" that helps Asia decarbonise off coal. This deserves a closer look, because it is largely false, and the false bit is precisely the bit that gets it past climate policy in Canberra.

Burning a megajoule of natural gas releases about 56 grams of CO₂. Burning a megajoule of black coal releases about 95 grams. On combustion alone, gas looks 40% cleaner. This is the arithmetic the industry quotes.

It is not the arithmetic that matters. Three things make actual LNG roughly a wash with coal, and on a bad month worse.

Methane leakage. Methane is the molecule. It is also a greenhouse gas with around 84 times the warming impact of CO₂ over twenty years. Independent measurements — from satellites, from aerial surveys, and from on-the-ground site studies — repeatedly find that 2–4% of the gas extracted from a well leaks somewhere along the chain between the wellhead and the burner tip. Some basins leak much more. The Permian basin in Texas was measured at 9% in 2020. At 3% leakage, the warming impact of LNG over twenty years is roughly equivalent to coal. At 4%, it is worse.

Closer to home, the Surat Basin in Queensland — the largest source of east coast LNG feedstock — has been measured repeatedly by independent researchers over the past decade. Aerial campaigns by the University of Wollongong and CSIRO between 2018 and 2022 found region-wide leakage in the 1–2% range, with individual super-emitter events visible from space via GHGSat and TROPOMI. The Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory, currently being prepared for full-scale development under the Future Gas Strategy, has elevated background methane that the federal government has resolutely declined to characterise before approving production. The figures the industry submits to the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory assume basin-average leakage rates closer to 0.5% — between two and ten times below what the satellites and aircraft are actually measuring, depending on the basin and the year. The Climate Analytics review of Australian fugitive methane and the IEEFA assessment both conclude the inventory under-reports by between 50% and 100%. The federal regulator — the Clean Energy Regulator — has not run a single direct measurement program on a producing Australian field. In 2026. We are pretending the gas leaks less than the gas is leaking, then hand the companies that leaking it a free royalty waiver.

Liquefaction is energy-intensive. Cooling natural gas to −162°C to liquefy it for shipping consumes about 10–12% of the gas itself, before it has reached the customer. That energy comes from burning some of the gas. Add shipping emissions, regasification at the receiving end, and another 1–2% of boil-off losses, and the energy efficiency of the LNG chain is roughly 80%. Twenty per cent of every tanker is being burned to deliver the rest. Which is only double the fossil fuel industry’s global average. About 10% of global fossil fuels are used to find mine and refine fossil fuels.

Scope 3 is enormous and we don't count it. When the LNG arrives in Japan, Korea, China or Taiwan and gets burned, the resulting CO₂ does not appear on Australia's national emissions ledger. It appears on the customer's. This is the historical accounting convention we lobbied for (along with the other petrostates), and it is the only reason Australia's national emissions look workable.

Here is what the actual carbon arithmetic looks like once you put the export side back on the ledger:

The numbers, plainly:

Australia's domestic emissions ledger (FY23): about 440 Mt CO₂-equivalent. That is the number Cabinet quotes.
LNG export combustion alone: about 223 Mt CO₂. Half our domestic ledger, on combustion alone, before any methane is added in.
LNG export full-lifecycle (combustion + liquefaction + methane leakage): 268 to 517 Mt CO₂-eq per year, depending on the methane leakage assumption (1% GWP-100 at the low end; 4% GWP-20 at the high). At the mid case — 3% leakage on the GWP-20 short-term metric that actually matters for the next two decades — Australian LNG exports alone produce roughly the same warming impact as Australia's entire domestic economy.
Coal export combustion (2023): about 1,000 Mt CO₂. That is more than twice our entire domestic ledger — from a single export sector, not counted on our books.
Combined: domestic + LNG scope 3 + coal scope 3 = roughly 1,700–1,950 Mt CO₂-eq/yr — three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half times the figure we report.

This is the sleight of hand in plain sight. Successive Australian governments have made every climate target sound achievable by pretending that the molecules we extract, ship and sell to the world somehow stop being our responsibility once they cross the export terminal. The atmosphere does not respect the distinction. The IPCC accounting convention is a national-reporting device, not a moral one. We are one of the biggest fossil exporters on the planet, behaving as though we are a polite middle-power emitter.

The polite version of this is in the IPCC AR6 working group reports. The impolite version is that the people who keep telling you LNG is a transition fuel work for the people whose super-profits depend on you believing it. They are good at their jobs. Their job is not honest arithmetic.

What A$46 billion a year actually buys

We could be smart like Norway and use our natural endowment to enrich ourselves and pay for a transition away from fossil fuels. Let’s imagine for a second the nice things Australia could have if we taxed gas like Qatar…

Public schools. A new Victorian state school costs around A$60 million fully fitted out. At that rate, foregone Qatar-equivalent revenue would build 767 new public schools every year. The entire Australian public-school capital backlog is around A$30 billion; one year of properly taxed LNG would clear it twice over and still leave change for hundreds of new schools or improvements.

Teachers — a second one in every public-school classroom. Australia has about 167,000 classrooms in active use across 9,600 schools — 106,000 of them in the public system. A new teaching FTE costs roughly A$95–105k base salary plus 25–30% on-costs (super, leave loading, professional development), so call it about A$125k all-in. A$13.3 billion buys a second teacher in every public-school classroom in the country. For about 29% of one year of foregone gas revenue, every public-school class in Australia would be co-taught, halving student to teacher ratios. Done across every school in the country (including Catholic and independent), it costs about A$21 billion — under half of what we are leaving on the table.

An EV for every public-school teacher. Australia has roughly 204,000 public-school teaching FTE (about 65% of the national 316k teaching workforce). They drive to work like everyone else. A mid-market EV is about A$40,000 drive-away. A$8 billion buys every public-school teacher in the country a brand-new EV. One year of properly taxed gas would do this five times over. We could give every underpaid public-school teacher in Australia a new EV every two years for the rest of their working career — and still have most of the A$46 billion left over for everything else.

Fast-charger network. A fully-installed 150 kW DC fast charger site in Australia costs around A$150,000 including grid connection, civil works and the unit itself. A$46 billion buys 307,000 fast-charger sites per year. Australia currently has about 3,700. One year of gas revenue could build a national fast-charging network 80 times the size of the existing one.

Electrify all Australian households. Imagine that campaign promise! A fully-installed Tesla Powerwall 3 (13.5 kWh) is about A$14,000 in 2025-26 before the federal rebate. A$46 billion would literally buy 3.3 million home batteries per year — roughly one for every third Australian household, every single year. A 6.6 kW system installed costs about A$5,500 after the STC rebate. A$46 billion buys 8.4 million rooftop systems per year — more than the total number of Australian houses without solar (about 7 million). One year of foregone gas revenue could finish the rooftop solar rollout for the entire country, with change. A mid-market EV (BYD Atto 3, MG 4, base Tesla Model 3) is about A$40,000 drive-away in 2026. A$46 billion buys 1.15 million EVs per year — twelve times the 91,000 EVs Australia bought across all of 2024. At BYD Atto 1 prices (A$24,000), the same money buys 1.84 million cars per year. We could electrify the entire light-vehicle fleet on properly taxed gas in under a decade.

That is one year of foregone gas revenue — close to fully allocated for the first time in this calculation, which is the point. Half a million rooftop solar systems. A million home batteries. A new EV in the driveway of every public-school teacher in the country. A national fast-charger network 27× the size of the existing one. Fifty new public schools, on top of the existing build pipeline. A second teacher in every public-school classroom. And still A$3 billion in change for hospitals or HECS forgiveness or the Murray–Darling. Every year. Until we stop gas and move to a non-climate-fucking exports paradigm, e.g. green metals and things.

That second to last sentence is the one that should make every taxpayer in this country furious. **We are leaving on the table, every year, more than enough to put a second teacher in every public-school classroom and an EV in every teacher's driveway and solar on half a million more roofs and a battery in a million more garages — and we are doing it so that Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies and ConocoPhillips can pay no royalty on the gas they extract from our continent.**

The arithmetic is not the constraint. The constraint is policy ambition.

From here to zero: What 30 years of properly taxed gas would buy

The annual story is striking. The cumulative story is overwhelming.

Imagine, for the sake of arithmetic, that we did three things at once. First, restore a Commonwealth royalty across all offshore LNG and adopt Pocock's 25% export tax — call it the Qatar-equivalent regime, an effective government take of about A$56 billion per year at 2023 export volumes. Second, legislate a phased wind-down of LNG export volumes — straight-line from today's 81 million tonnes to zero by 2055, a thirty-year managed exit that takes every existing LNG facility through to the back end of its useful life. Third, hypothecate every cent of the resulting revenue into a sovereign-style transition fund. And don’t open new projects.

The cumulative volume of LNG exported over the wind-down is about 1,215 million tonnes — the area under the triangle from 81 Mt today to zero in 2055. At Qatar's effective per-tonne take, the cumulative federal revenue is about A$840 billion, with a defensible range of A$520–A$840 billion depending on what LNG price you assume. Use A$840 billion as the round number.

That is enough to write the country a different story. I’ve long believed the climate warriors have failed on story — we make winning at climate sound like failure. But it could be victory; here is what A$840 billion buys as we get of gas…

Forgive every dollar of outstanding HECS debt. Total outstanding student loan balance is about A$80 billion. ✓
A A$100 billion endowment to halve domestic university fees forever — paying ~A$5 billion per year in perpetuity at a 5% real return. Or free university for half the kids, every cohort, in perpetuity. ✓
A$2 billion per year on first-of-a-kind industrial decarbonisation demonstrations during this critical decade. Front-load the next ten years — green-iron, green-aluminium, green-ammonia, lithium processing, silicon refining — first plants in the world, all in Australia, all delivered before 2036. A$20 billion. Setting up for A half a trillion a year in exports into the foreseeable future, making the metals the world needs for decarbonization.✓
A national EV charging network built out to its proper scale — roughly 50,000 fast-charger sites plus destination AC chargers and home incentives. About A$20 billion. ✓
An A$10,000 EV subsidy for every Australian household — one per house, applied at point of sale, no means test, valid for any zero-emissions vehicle. 10.7 million households × A$10,000 = A$107 billion. Enough to make a A$24,000 BYD cost A$14,000 in every driveway in Australia. ✓
Fifty per cent more public-school teachers — Australia's 204,000 public-school teaching FTE plus another 102,000, every year of the wind-down. 102,000 × A$125k all-in × 25 years = A$319 billion. Smaller class sizes, more specialist support, more relief for the existing workforce. The most consequential single intervention in education policy that money can buy. ✓
The full Melbourne–Sydney–Brisbane high-speed rail corridor — every stage of the High Speed Rail Authority's plan, the trains we should already be riding, end-to-end coverage of the east coast: about A$200 billion. ✓

Subtotal: A$846 billion — bang on the cumulative pot. Every item on the wish list, paid for in full, in cash, with no borrowing, by a single 30-year industry wind-down at the rate Qatar already charges its own LNG industry.

Three notes on what this trade looks like in practice:

The thirty-year wind-down is not aggressive. It takes every existing LNG facility through the back end of its design life. Nobody loses a job to a sudden shutdown. Nothing gets stranded. The schedule simply removes the assumption that we will keep approving new capacity in 2030 and 2035 and 2040.
The wish list does not include any of the things the gas industry currently opposes on principle: the items above are HECS forgiveness, university funding, more teachers, more EV charging, more EVs in households, and fast trains. Almost no one in Australian politics is against any of those things on the merits. They are opposed only by the constraint that we have not figured out how to pay for them. The arithmetic above is how we pay for them.
The wish list also does not require Australia to stop being an LNG exporter on Day One. It requires Australia to start being a properly-taxed LNG exporter on Day One, and to plan its own exit on a timeline that any other adult country in possession of a finite resource would consider reasonable.

Hold production flat at 81 Mt for the full thirty years (no wind-down at all) and the cumulative pot is A$1.7 trillion — twice what the wish list above costs. Slow the wind-down (50% of today's volumes by 2055 instead of zero) and the pot is about A$1.25 trillion — leaves A$400 billion in change for things we have not even thought to ask for yet.

The point is not which version of this you prefer. The point is that none of the choices above currently exist in Australian policy. The default is: do nothing, collect A$10 billion a year, watch the LNG ships leave Karratha while drinking beer that is highly taxed. Every year that the default holds, A$30–A$50 billion in foregone revenue evaporates. Across thirty years of holding the default, we will give away the price of a fully decarbonised, debt-free, fast-rail-connected, well-taught, free-university Australia with an EV in every driveway, and we will give it to the same four foreign multinationals that have corrupted our politics and polluted our media environment for the last four decades.

The arithmetic is not the constraint. The constraint is, as ever, policy.

And the jobs?

The fossil gas industry's most reliable political defence is jobs. Every threat of reform meets the same line — that any change risks investment, that LNG creates regional employment, that 80,000 Australians depend on the sector. The actual employment numbers are smaller and worse than that. I call bullshit.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics records 18,200 direct jobs in oil and gas extraction across all of Australia in FY2023 — covering offshore platforms, onshore CSG operations, and the LNG plants themselves. The industry's peak body claims 80,000 "direct and indirect" jobs through input-output multipliers, but this methodology has been publicly criticised by Treasury officials and economists as analytically invalid: applied consistently across all industries, it generates more total jobs than exist in Australia. It also obscures the fact that most LNG construction work happens overseas — Bechtel's three Queensland LNG trains were modular, designed in Houston, New Delhi and Shanghai and built in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Shell's Prelude floating LNG facility was built in South Korea by Samsung Heavy Industries. In WA, the entire industry employs around 10,600 people — about 0.7% of the state workforce.

That's the baseline. Eighteen thousand direct jobs, supporting an industry that exports A$86 billion in product and pays back about A$10 billion in tax. Almost all of those jobs would continue to exist if a 20% royalty were imposed tomorrow — wells do not close because their tax bill rises by a few cents per MMBtu. The Karratha plant doesn't pack up and move to Vladivostok over a royalty change.

Now consider the alternative. Using Australian-specific employment factors from the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures (commissioned by the Clean Energy Council) and ABS sector data, here is what A$29 billion of redirected spending creates each year:

Spending category: New public schools (construction) — Quantity per year: 50 — Direct jobs created: ~15,000 FTE-years (one-off)
Spending category: Public schools (ongoing teachers + staff) — Quantity per year: 50 × ~60 staff — Direct jobs created: ~3,000 (ongoing)
Spending category: Home battery installations — Quantity per year: 1,000,000 — Direct jobs created: ~5,200 ongoing
Spending category: Rooftop solar (3,300 MW) — Quantity per year: 500,000 — Direct jobs created: ~15,400 ongoing
Spending category: EV sales, service, infrastructure — Quantity per year: 200,000 — Direct jobs created: ~28,000
Spending category: DC fast-charger sites — Quantity per year: 10,000 — Direct jobs created: ~970
Spending category: Total — A$29B portfolio — Direct jobs created: ~68,000 jobs
Spending category: For comparison: total LNG industry — Direct jobs created: 18,200 jobs

The realistic portfolio creates roughly 3.7× as many direct Australian jobs as the entire LNG extraction industry currently does — and it does so on two-thirds of the foregone revenue. If you strip out the school construction one-offs, you still get around 53,000 ongoing jobs. Three times the LNG workforce.

The geographic distribution matters too. LNG jobs are concentrated in three regional centres — Karratha, Gladstone, Darwin — with a combined population of about 100,000. The alternative jobs are spread across every suburb in the country: a rooftop solar installer works wherever there are roofs; an EV mechanic works wherever there are EVs. The Climate Council's analysis found that up to two-thirds of renewable energy jobs are in regional areas, and rooftop solar is the most accessible job type because installations are by definition where people already live and work.

A final note on the "investment certainty" argument. Qatar charges its 20% royalty plus 35% corporate tax plus state-equity dividend cut, and the same multinationals that operate in Australia — Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, ConocoPhillips — have just signed up to a US$45 billion expansion of Qatar's North Field rather than walking away. The empirical evidence from the only directly comparable jurisdiction in the world is that a Qatar-style fiscal regime does not destroy the industry. It simply redirects the surplus from foreign shareholders to the public balance sheet.

What a 25% LNG export tax would actually raise

Senator David Pocock has, in submissions to the Senate Economics Committee and in his own published positions, been the only member of federal parliament consistently proposing a 25% LNG export tax. The mechanism is exactly what it sounds like: tax 25% of the FOB value of every tonne of LNG that leaves an Australian terminal. It does not require renegotiating the PRRT. It does not depend on the gas price reaching some "super-profit" threshold. It does not vest in 16 separate corporate accounting universes that the ATO has to litigate one by one. It is a single line item levied at the dock.

What does that actually raise? Here is the curve, modelled against the LNG price:

Three numbers on that curve are worth holding in your head:

At long-run pre-2022 average price (~US$8/MMBtu) — the kind of price the industry says is "normal" — a 25% export tax raises A$13 billion per year. That is more than twice the entire current Commonwealth take from LNG.
At the 2023 Asian contract average (~US$13.5/MMBtu) — the price that actually applied in the year my figure-one chart is built around — it raises A$22 billion per year. That is twelve times the PRRT.
At the 2022 Russia-spike price (~US$22/MMBtu) — the windfall year that produced the super-profits Verrender wrote about — it raises A$36 billion per year. The tax pays for itself, and most of the alternative spending portfolio above, in one year of price spike.

And critically, this is just the LNG export tax. It does not include restoring the 10% Commonwealth royalty across all offshore projects. It does not include phasing out the diesel rebate to the gas industry's own trucks. It does not include the corporate income tax that the major LNG operators have not been paying for most of the past decade. It is the single most-administrable, hardest-to-avoid, most-easily-legislated lever the government has refused to pull.

What a serious country would do

If we were a serious country, the response writes itself.

1. Restore a Commonwealth royalty across all offshore LNG. A 10% royalty applied to all production, not just North West Shelf, lifts collections by an estimated A$3.5–5 billion immediately. A 20% Qatar-equivalent royalty lifts it by A$30–35 billion. This is a one-line legislative change. It does not require renegotiating PRRT. It does not depend on the gas price. It is the simplest, most administrable, hardest-to-avoid lever in the toolkit.

2. Adopt Pocock's 25% LNG export tax. A$13–36 billion a year on its own, depending on price. This is the chart above. It does not need a legislative miracle, it does not need PRRT reform, and it does not need anyone in Canberra to be braver than David Pocock. It just needs the major parties to follow him.

3. Phase out the diesel fuel tax credit for major mining operations. This is the lever Pocock has been pulling on at the same time. The gas industry alone receives roughly A$1 billion a year back in fuel tax credits — money that funds the diesel for the trucks, generators, and platforms that produce the gas we then under-tax. Cap the rebate at A$50 million per company per year and recycle the remainder into electrification of mine fleets and on-site renewables.

4. Stop approving new LNG capacity. Browse, Scarborough Pluto Train 2, Beetaloo, Barossa, Narrabri, Surat — none of them pass the climate trigger or the fiscal trigger.

5. Measure our own methane. The federal regulator should run mandatory aerial and continuous-monitoring programs across every producing Australian gas basin, with the data published openly, and the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory's emissions factors recalibrated to what the satellites and the aircraft are actually measuring rather than the numbers the industry wishes were true.

6. Electrify the domestic demand side, hard. Victoria has shown the way: legislated end-of-life replacement for gas hot water from March 2027, all-electric new builds from January 2027, A$5,500 rebates to swap a gas ducted heater for a reverse-cycle system. NSW, Queensland and South Australia should be following the same template. The household end of the gas death spiral is solved by heat pumps, induction, and a rooftop solar system; the policy job is to make the financing of those replacements available at the moment of appliance failure.

7. Tell the truth about Scope 3. Stop the accounting fiction that says LNG burned in Tokyo doesn't appear on Australia's emissions ledger. The Climate Change Act should be amended to require disclosure of Scope 3 emissions from approved fossil-fuel projects, even if those emissions remain offshore for international reporting. The point is to make Cabinet read the number out loud before approving Browse.

None of this is radical. Every item has been implemented somewhere less sunny, less windy, and less wealthy than Australia.

We are giving away the wealth of our continent. We are doing it for free, to an industry that does not employ many people, that does not pay tax, that runs on a diesel rebate from the same taxpayers it is short-changing, that markets its product as a "transition fuel" that on close inspection isn't transitioning anything except wealth offshore. And then there is their misinformation campaigns and political donations corrupting democracy.

These are choices. Like all choices, they can be changed.

To the friend who underlined those passages in Plug In! and asked me to fact-check the numbers: the original lines were too generous to the government of the day. IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THOUGHT. The book understated the giveaway. In the meantime, send this post to anyone who tells you the gas industry is what's keeping the lights on. The lights run on solar and batteries and wind and hydro. The gas industry just makes the oligarchs richer.

P.S. The biggest hat tip on this post belongs to Richard Denniss at The Australia Institute, who has been hammering this drum harder and longer than anyone in the country. For over a decade Richard has been the one publicly pointing out that Australia's gas industry pays less tax than Australian beer drinkers, that the input-output "indirect jobs" multipliers the gas industry trots out are statistical nonsense, and that the PRRT was designed by lobbyists. The fact that any of these arguments are now mainstream is largely because he has refused to stop making them in print, in podcasts, and on every panel show that will have him. The Australia Institute's specific work on the Qatar comparison — Mark Saunders and Rod Campbell's May 2025 report — is the heavy arithmetic this post sits on. Buy them all a beer. Buy them several. They have earned it.

P.P.S. Equally massive hat tip to Konrad Benjamin at Punters Politics — the guy who has done more in the last two years to make the gas-tax giveaway a kitchen-table issue for Australians under forty than any politician, journalist, or think-tank put together. His TikToks and Instagrams on PRRT, on Norway's sovereign wealth fund, on the diesel rebate, and on the Qatar comparison have been viewed by millions of Australians who would never read an Australia Institute report. He is doing the public-comprehension job that the ABC's 7.30 used to do, on the platforms where people actually live now. Follow him. Share his stuff.

P.P.P.S. Hat tip to Ian Verrender at the ABC, whose June 2022 piece was the source for the original passage in Plug In! that triggered this whole post. The framing is still right. The numbers got bigger.

P.P.P.P.S. For a serious senator on this issue, follow David Pocock's PRRT, diesel-rebate and 25% LNG export-tax work. He is the only person in the Senate consistently asking why beer drinkers pay more in excise than LNG exporters pay in resource rent. This is cross-bench leadership of a kind we used to expect from the major parties.

P.P.P.P.P.S. If you live in Victoria, your state government has done the world's most ambitious residential gas phase-out — I’ve got a big substack on this coming up — and the Andrews/Allan governments have shown that the politics of "ditching gas at home" is much less spicy than people thought.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Norway runs a sovereign wealth fund worth US$1.7 trillion off its hydrocarbons. We could be doing this. We chose not to. The "luckiest country" continues to test the proposition that you can be lucky and stupid at the same time, indefinitely.

References

Every numeric and named-source claim in the body, grouped by topic. URLs verified May 2026.

Royalties, taxation and government revenue

Saunders, M. & Campbell, R. (May 2025). Government revenue from LNG exports: Australia vs Qatar. The Australia Institute.
IMF (Feb 2025). Qatar — 2024 Article IV Consultation: Press Release; Staff Report. Country Report No. 25/47.
Verstegen, P., Ogge, M. & Campbell, R. (May 2024). Australia's great gas giveaway. The Australia Institute.
Australian Taxation Office (2025). PRRT data in the Corporate tax transparency report 2023–24.
ATO (2024). Corporate Tax Transparency Report 2022-23.
Treasury (2023). Budget 2023-24, Budget Paper 1. p.180.
Senator David Pocock. New Senate Inquiry to Examine the Great Gas Giveaway.
Senator David Pocock. Stop the Aussie Gas Scam petition.
Verrender, I. (13 June 2022). How your spiking energy bills are making foreign investors rich. ABC News. (Original cited by Griffith, Plug In!, p. 222.)
McIlroy, T. (Dec 2019). Oil, gas "systemic non-payers" of tax. Australian Financial Review.
Government of Western Australia / DomGas Alliance. WA Domestic Gas Reservation Policy.
World Trade Organization (2005). Trade Policy Review — Qatar.
PwC (2025). Worldwide Tax Summaries: Qatar — Corporate Taxes on Income.

LNG industry: production, exports, projects

Department of Industry, Science & Resources. Resources and Energy Quarterly — December 2023 and March 2024 editions.
AEMO (March 2024). 2024 Gas Statement of Opportunities.
AEMO (2024). Victorian Gas Planning Report Update.
DCCEEW (May 2024). Australia's Future Gas Strategy. Minister Madeleine King.
Bloomberg (12 Sept 2025). Woodside's North West Shelf Gets Final Nod to Run to 2070 in Australia.
Climate Analytics (2025). The full implications of Australia's North West Shelf decision.
ExxonMobil (June 2022). ExxonMobil and QatarEnergy to expand LNG production with North Field East agreement.
U.S. Energy Information Administration (Oct 2025). Country Analysis Brief: Qatar.
The Australia Institute (May 2024). Gas in WA: The economy. (Modular construction, jobs, WA workforce share.)

Climate and methane

IPCC (2021). Sixth Assessment Report Working Group I, Chapter 7: The Earth's Energy Budget, Climate Feedbacks and Climate Sensitivity. (GWP factors: CH₄ GWP-100 = 27-30, GWP-20 = 80-86.)
DCCEEW. National Greenhouse Gas Inventory: Quarterly updates.
Geoscience Australia. Australia's Energy Commodity Resources 2023 (coal export volumes).
IEA (2024). Global Methane Tracker 2024.
IEEFA (2024). Fugitive methane emissions cast dark cloud over Australia's Net Zero ambitions.
IEEFA (2024). Australia's coalmine methane mirage: The urgent need for accurate emissions reporting.
Climate Analytics. Dug up in Australia, burned around the world — exporting fossil fuels undermines climate targets.
Zhang, Y. et al. (April 2020). Quantifying methane emissions from the largest oil-producing basin in the United States from space. Science Advances. (Permian satellite measurement: 3.7% leakage rate).
Chen, Y. et al. (March 2022). Quantifying Regional Methane Emissions in the New Mexico Permian Basin with a Comprehensive Aerial Survey. Environmental Science & Technology. (9.4% +3.5%/-3.3% of gross gas production.)
Day, S. et al. (2021). Coal seam gas industry methane emissions in the Surat Basin, Australia: comparing airborne measurements with inventories. Phil. Trans. Royal Society A.
Luhar, A. et al. (2020). Quantifying methane emissions from Queensland's coal seam gas producing Surat Basin using inventory data and a regional Bayesian inversion. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
CSIRO GISERA. Methane seepage in the Surat Basin (research program).

Jobs and employment

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2024). Labour Force, Australia, Detailed, Table EQ06 (oil & gas extraction industry employment).
ABS (2023). Schools, Australia.
Denniss, R. (May 2021). Be suspicious of claims the mining industry creates non-mining jobs. The Conversation.
Briggs, C., Rutovitz, J. & Dominish, E. (2020). Renewable Energy Jobs in Australia. Clean Energy Council / UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures. Summary at
Australian Energy Producers (formerly APPEA) (2022). Federal Budget 2022/23 Submission. (80,000 direct + indirect jobs claim, methodology critiqued by Denniss above.)

Spending portfolio: unit costs

Victorian School Building Authority (May 2024). Budget builds on growing schools and kinders.
Australian Education Union (Feb 2024). $30 Billion Capital Divide in Australian Schools Revealed in New Report.
Solar Choice (2026). Tesla Powerwall 3 Buying Guide.
Solar Choice (2026). Solar Power System Prices.
WhichCar / CarsGuide / RACV (2026). Cheapest electric cars in Australia. (Mid-market EV ~A$40k drive-away; BYD Atto 1 entry ~A$24k.)
Electric Vehicle Council (Dec 2024). State of Electric Vehicles 2024.
Property Manager Insider; EVSE Australia (2026). Commercial DC Fast Charger costs. (~A$150k per fully-installed 150 kW site.)
Norges Bank Investment Management. The fund's value (Norway Government Pension Fund Global ≈ US$2.2 trillion).
Australian Taxation Office. HELP outstanding loan balance — FY23-24 statistics. (Total outstanding ≈ A$81 billion before 2025 20% reduction; ≈ A$65 billion after.)
Department of Education (2025). 20% reduction of student loan debt.

High-speed rail

High Speed Rail Authority.
Infrastructure Australia (Nov 2025). Stage 3 Evaluation Report — HSR Sydney–Newcastle business case.
Infrastructure Australia. Corridor preservation for East Coast High Speed Rail.

Error estimates

Every figure in the piece carries uncertainty. This is the audit. Where the post uses a single number, this section gives the defensible range and what drives the variance.

The three charts in the body

Figure 1 — Qatar vs Australia government revenue (3-bar chart)

Qatar A$56 B — uncertainty ±A$3-5 B (≈ ±5-10%). Drivers: IMF apportionment of total hydrocarbon revenue between LNG, oil, condensate, helium and petrochemicals; AUD/USD exchange rate volatility (±5% annually); Qatar fiscal year vs calendar year reporting differences.
Australia A$9.6 B (net of FTC) — uncertainty ±A$1.5 B (≈ ±15%). Drivers: fuel-tax-credit allocation to gas industry not separately reported by ATO (defensible apportionment range A$0.7-1.5 B); state vs federal royalty split; PRRT volatility (FY23-24 = A$1.48 B; sub-A$0.1 B in earlier years).
5.8× ratio — range across years: 4.5× (low-price) to 7× (price-spike). 2023 reference is a high-water mark.
A$46 B foregone — uncertainty ±A$10-15 B. The royalty-only uplift (excluding Qatar's 75% state-equity dividend, which Australia could not retroactively replicate) is closer to A$30-35 B; the Australia Institute's headline foregone-revenue figure is A$27 B at long-run prices.

Figure 2 — Pocock 25% LNG export tax revenue curve

Volume 81 Mt/yr — ±2 Mt year-to-year (Department of Industry export volumes).
Energy content 52 MMBtu/tonne — ±3% depending on LNG composition (heavier or lighter alkane fractions).
AUD/USD = 0.64 — fluctuates ±5-10% annually. The full curve scales linearly with the exchange rate.
Resulting revenue at any given price — combined uncertainty roughly ±10-15% from the above factors. Substantially larger if LNG prices move outside the 5-25 USD/MMBtu range plotted.
A$22 B/yr at 2023 reference — ±A$3-4 B.

Figure 3 — Australia domestic emissions vs scope-3 from fossil exports

Australia domestic 440 Mt CO₂-eq — ±10-15 Mt. Source: DCCEEW NGGI Q4 update for year-to-June-2024 (the most recent settled figure; FY23 was 465 Mt).
LNG combustion alone 223 Mt — ±10 Mt. Driver: LNG composition (96% CH₄ assumption is approximate; some Australian fields are heavier).
LNG full-lifecycle 268-517 Mt — the range itself is the uncertainty. Driven by methane leakage assumption (1% to 4%) and GWP horizon (100-year to 20-year). MID estimate (313 Mt at 3% leakage, GWP-100) is the inventory-comparable figure; HIGH estimate (517 Mt at 4% leakage, GWP-20) is the appropriate metric for next-20-year climate decisions.
Coal export combustion ~1,000 Mt — ±50-100 Mt. Australia exported ~199 Mt thermal + ~178 Mt metallurgical in 2023; combustion factors thermal 2.5 t CO₂/t and metallurgical 2.9 t CO₂/t. Excludes mine-mouth methane (an additional 50-80 Mt CO₂-eq). Climate Analytics' integrated 2024 estimate of all AU fossil-export scope-3 was 1.15 Gt CO₂.
3.9-4.4× domestic ledger — robust range; would shrink to 2.5-3× if methane assumptions move to the inventory's 0.5% leakage rate, and grow to 5× if IEA's "92% higher than reported" estimate proves correct in subsequent measurement campaigns.

Headline numbers in the prose

81 Mt LNG/yr (Australia 2023) — ±2 Mt.
80 Mt LNG/yr (Qatar 2023) — ±2 Mt.
A$85 B FOB export value each — ±A$10 B (driven by spot-vs-contract mix and AUD/USD).
56% of AU LNG royalty-free — ±2% (depends on quarterly project-by-project mix).
A$238 B accumulated PRRT credits — ±A$20-30 B (subject to recalibration of commodity-indexed exploration credit roll-forwards).
A$1 B/yr fuel tax credits to gas industry — A$0.7-1.5 B range.
Methane leakage 2-4% in published measurements — Permian satellite (Zhang 2020): 3.7%. Permian aerial subset (Chen 2022): 9.4% +3.5/-3.3. Surat Basin (Luhar 2020): 1-2%. Australian NGGI assumed factor: ~0.5%. IEA (2024) estimate of AU oil/gas methane: 92% higher than reported.
18,200 direct LNG jobs (FY23) — ±1,500 (quarterly volatility plus ANZSIC code overlap with onshore CSG and oil).
10,600 WA LNG jobs / 0.7% of state workforce — Australia Institute, drawing on ABS Census; ±500.
Liquefaction energy penalty 10-12% — defensible across published LCA studies; some Australian trains are slightly less efficient (12-13%) due to ambient temperature.

Spending portfolio (annual, A$46 B)

Powerwall 3 A$14k — A$13.5-16.5 k installed range (Solar Choice / PSC Energy 2026).
6.6 kW solar A$5.5k after STC — A$5.0-6.5 k installed range.
Mid-market EV A$40k — A$35-45 k drive-away (BYD Atto 3, MG 4, base Tesla Model 3).
DC fast charger site A$150k — A$120-200 k depending on grid-connection cost; some remote sites significantly higher.
New Victorian state school A$60M — Victorian School Building Authority FY24-25 budget of A$948 M for 16 new schools (A$59 M each); larger metro schools A$80-120 M.
AU public-school capital backlog A$30 B — AEU 2024 figure; estimates from other sources range A$25-40 B.

From here to zero (cumulative, 2026-2055)

Cumulative LNG volume 1,012 Mt (2050 wind-down) — assumes linear straight-line decline; actual trajectory could front-load or back-load production by ±100 Mt cumulative. Negligible effect on the headline.
Cumulative LNG volume 1,215 Mt (2055 wind-down) — same assumption.
Cumulative federal revenue A$420-A$840 B — wide range driven by:
Wind-down date (2040 / 2050 / 2055) — ±A$300-400 B.
Reference LNG price ($8 long-run avg vs $13.5 2023 avg) — ±A$200 B at 2050 wind-down.
Choice between full Qatar take (royalty + corp tax + state-equity dividend) vs royalty-only — ±A$150 B over 25 years.
A$700 B (2050 base case, 2023 reference prices) — ±A$150 B realistic range.
A$840 B (2055 base case, 2023 reference prices) — ±A$180 B realistic range.

Wish-list line items

Forgive all HECS A$80 B — total outstanding A$81 B end-FY24; reduces to ~A$65 B after 2025 20% reduction. So if executed in 2026 the cost is closer to A$65 B (saves A$15 B against the wish list).
A$100 B university endowment — sized to yield ~A$5 B/yr at 5% real return. Smaller endowment of A$50 B would yield ~A$2.5 B/yr; halving fees needs roughly A$8-10 B/yr in fee relief, so A$100 B is the right order of magnitude. ±A$30 B depending on yield assumption (4-6% real).
A$2 B/yr industrial decarb × 10 yrs front-loaded = A$20 B — figure pinned by user. Real costs of green-iron, green-cement, green-ammonia first plants vary A$0.5-2 B per plant; A$20 B funds 10-15 first-of-a-kind demonstrations.
50% more public-school teachers × 25 yrs = A$319 B — 102,000 additional teachers × A$125k all-in × 25 yrs. Uncertainty ±A$30 B (real wage growth assumption; FTE vs headcount).
A$10k EV subsidy × 10.7 M households = A$107 B — household count from ABS 2021 Census projected to 2026; ±A$5 B.
Full Mel-Syd-Bri HSR A$200 B — wide range A$114-300 B across published studies (Phase 2 HSR Study 2013 indexed; HSRA Stage 1 business case 2024-25; Bureau of Infrastructure Australia Nov 2025). Sydney–Newcastle stage alone A$55-61 B; full corridor estimates have inflated as more design detail emerges.
National EV charging buildout A$20 B — covers ~50,000 fast-charger sites + AC destination + home incentives. Defensible to ±A$5 B; some industry estimates as high as A$30-40 B for full coverage.
Wish-list subtotal A$846 B — combined uncertainty ±A$80-100 B.

Caveats this section does not address

All costs are in 2026 A$. Real-cost inflation over a 25-30 year program could shift line items ±15-25%, but is partially offset by likely real declines in solar, battery and EV unit costs.
Macroeconomic feedbacks (taxing the LNG sector affects investment, employment and downstream prices) are not modelled.
The piece holds AUD/USD = 0.64 throughout. Persistent moves to 0.55 or 0.75 would shift Australian-dollar revenue by ±15%.
"Net of fuel tax credits" assumes A$1 B/yr apportionment to the gas industry — this is the Australia Institute's defensible mid-case; the true figure has not been disclosed by the ATO.
Methane GWPs: this piece uses the IPCC AR6 widely-cited rounded values (28 / 84). The IPCC's source-disaggregated values are 27.2-29.8 (GWP-100) and 80.8-82.5 (GWP-20); the rounded values introduce <5% additional uncertainty into the climate calculations.

The Iran war exposes our stupidity. Australia should stop buying oil and electrify everything.

Saul Griffith — Mon, 04 May 2026 01:59:54 GMT

Starting with the money: Australia spends approximately $165 million every single day on imported petroleum. That is $6.9 million an hour. It never stops. In 2022–23, total petroleum imports exceeded $60 billion. Diesel alone cost $33 billion — more than the combined export earnings of wheat and wool. We have no pricing power in the market and the obvious substitute beams from our skies in abundance.

$165M spent offshore daily
~90% of refined fuel imported
2 refineries remaining
<30 days strategic reserve
Bugger-all jobs are created other than retail petrol station attendants

Figure 1 — Australia: oil supply and end use, flows indexed to 100. Domestic crude is exported to Indonesia and Singapore; refined product is imported from South Korea and Singapore. Faded bands show overseas export flows. Every fossil flow has a clean substitute we know how to build. The expensive thing is not the transition. The expensive thing is what we’re doing now.

Sector by sector: What serious oil and energy policy would actually look like.

If we were serious about solving Australia's oil problem — which is coupled to the global disaster of the final days of fossil-fuel diplomacy led by Trump, Putin, and Middle East despots — the diagram above is what policy would respond to. Imagine that for a second — science based policy! — it rolls off the tongue. The figure is a Sankey diagram (obviously one of my fave types) of all the flows of oil and petroleum products in and out of Australia. Each box on the right is a place where Australian dollars leave the country every single day — virtually all have a known electric replacement today, and those that don't will yield to focussed R&D in the near future.

This matters for a particular reason. When the Iranian parliament voted to close the Strait of Hormuz on June 22, 2025 — the day after the United States flew B-2 bombers to Ferdows — every box on the right of this diagram became a national-security exposure. When the next American president (or more likely this one) decides Venezuelan oil is now a national-interest matter and parks a carrier group off Caracas, the big box marked "Cars & LVs (Light Vehicles)" becomes more expensive. When OPEC+ tightens quota, when a Singapore refinery goes down for unplanned maintenance, when a Houthi missile misses or hits a tanker in the Red Sea — these are the geopolitical moments every Australian feels as it manifests in the increased costs of these energy flows. The diagram is the country's oil-driven foreign-policy exposure, drawn in barrels per day.

So let's walk it left to right and replace each fossil flow with the cheapest clean alternative we already know how to build. These are round numbers — within a factor of two — but they all point the same direction: electrification.

Cars and light vehicles: ~$25 billion/yr in petrol. Around 18 million light vehicles each driving roughly 13,000 km/yr at ~17 c/km in fuel. Replace petrol with battery-electric vehicles charged on rooftop solar at ~2 c/km, or on the grid at 4–5 c/km. Savings when all cars are electric: ~$20 billion/yr. Pathway: keep the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard at its original 60% trajectory, mandate EV sales targets (50% by 2030, 100% by 2035), means-tested purchase rebate. Credit and finance schemes that reach deep into the low-income bracket, where the savings matter the most. The technology is on the showroom floor today. For a bonus credit, the Australian government would fund and run a competition to build Australia's first electric vehicle — a ute for our conditions — and then help the winning efforts become companies. It doesn't matter if they use Chinese components for half of it; it would be an Australian EV for Australian conditions. We can think bigger; we just have a government that doesn't try (even though they try more than the last guys, to give them credit).

Heavy freight trucks: ~$15 billion/yr in diesel. Long-haul prime movers at 35–40 L/100 km × $1.90/L is roughly 70 c/km. Battery-electric trucks at ~1.5 kWh/km × 10 c/kWh is ~15 c/km. Saving: $10–12 billion/yr. Pathway: 350 kW depot charging at every major service centre on the five backbone freight corridors; 1 MW charging for the heaviest hauls; rail modal shift on the long thin lines like Sydney–Brisbane. Volvo, Mercedes eActros, Tesla Semi and BYD are already shipping product. Dan Bleakley and his mates at New Energy Transport are already running better economics on the Sydney–Canberra corridor with Chinese-built Windrose prime movers — 85% lower energy cost than diesel and 25 minutes faster door to door. Their Wilton depot south-west of Sydney will anchor electrified runs to Wollongong, Newcastle and Canberra by year-end and Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide by 2031.

Mining vehicles and operations: ~$11 billion/yr in diesel + $4.5 billion/yr in fuel-tax-credit refund. Battery and trolley-assist haul trucks (Liebherr T 264, Komatsu 930E electric, Boliden's Aitik trolley network) cut diesel by 70–90% on site; mine-site solar at $0.55/W beats diesel-generated electricity by an order of magnitude. Saving: ~$9 billion/yr in fuel, plus reclaiming the $4.5 billion subsidy. Pathway: phase out the rebate at the top end and recycle the proceeds into co-financing the first wave of mine-fleet electrifications and on-site renewables.

Domestic aviation: ~$3 billion/yr in jet fuel. Sydney–Melbourne, Sydney–Brisbane and Sydney–Canberra are short enough to lose 30–50% of their passenger volume to a 300 km/h train. Battery and hybrid-electric regional aircraft (Eviation Alice, Heart Aerospace ES-30) handle the sub-500 km segments. Saving: $1–1.5 billion/yr. Pathway: build the train; underwrite the first regional electric aircraft service. FIFO is a perfect first market for an electric 19-seat aircraft that could be built in Australia — fast-track the certification.

International aviation: ~$5 billion/yr in jet fuel. No clean drop-in solution at scale yet. Sustainable aviation fuel from feedstocks we already grow (canola, sugarcane, used cooking oil, MSW pyrolysis) gets you to ~10% blend without changing engines; we could even farm seaweed and convert that for some portion. Green hydrogen is a 2040 question but personally I'd bet on synthetic or biofuels. Pathway: a SAF mandate on departures from Australian airports and demand-side honesty about which trips actually need to be flown.

Industrial chemicals and plastics: ~$2 billion/yr in petroleum feedstocks. Methanol from green hydrogen plus captured CO₂ replaces naphtha as the platform molecule for plastics; mechanical and chemical recycling cut virgin demand by another 20–30%. Saving: modest in dollars but eliminates a hard import dependency. Pathway: electrified steam crackers, recycled-content mandates, a domestic green-methanol plant. I'd suggest going even further and trying to radically lower demand by pushing for new models in non-(petrochemical) plastic packaging.

Agriculture: ~$5 billion/yr in diesel + ~$1.5 billion/yr in imported urea. Battery tractors (Monarch, Fendt e100, John Deere autonomous) for the smaller jobs right now — obviously bigger ones are coming as battery density improves. Biodiesel for the biggest harvesters in the short term; green ammonia made onshore with WA and SA solar replaces imported urea. Saving: $3–4 billion/yr at scale, plus the supply chain comes home. Pathway: extend equipment depreciation rules to include batteries and chargers; underwrite the first commercial green-ammonia plant.

Rail: ~$2 billion/yr in diesel. Mainline electrification at roughly $10 million/km in flat country, plus battery locomotives for branch lines and the last mile. Saving: ~$1.4 billion/yr. Pathway: a national rail-electrification program — like the one we built half a century ago for the Sydney suburbs and never finished for the rest of the country. The reality is that half or more of the diesel powering rail in Australia is moving coal or iron to an export market.

Marine and coastal shipping: ~$1 billion/yr. Methanol and maybe ammonia engines for international (though I think this will yield to hybrid-battery configurations sooner than people think), battery short-sea, wind-assisted bulk carriers. Saving: ~$0.5 billion/yr plus a sovereign shipping option that doesn't depend on a Singapore bunker bill. Pathway: green-corridor agreements with Singapore, Korea and Japan; first electric ferry routes on Sydney Harbour and the Brisbane River. A trade partnership with Korea on our green iron and lithium for them to build these ships for us and the world.

Add it up and you get on the order of $45 billion per year in fuel savings at full electrification. Add the $4.5 billion diesel rebate. Plus the trade balance shifts by tens of billions because we stop sending dollars to Singapore and Riyadh. $135 million per day.

What driving actually costs: Petrol vs electric

Here is the number that should end the conversation in this country specifically: a battery electric vehicle charged on rooftop solar costs approximately 2 cents per kilometre in fuel. A petrol car costs approximately 18 cents per kilometre. Nine to one. Our solar versus Middle Eastern oil.

Overnight grid charging at average Australian residential rates means an EV costs around 4–5 c/km. Charging from a public fast charge is 10-12c/km. In every case, electric charging wins. We need more public and workplace charging and incentives to charge in the middle of the day, but in round figures we can easily say that for the average driver covering 13,000 km/yr, that is $1,700–$2,000/yr saved, compounding into $25,000–$35,000 in avoided fuel over a vehicle's life. Over four million Australian homes already have solar. For those households, surplus generation that would otherwise be exported for pennies or nothing at all can charge a car at an effective marginal cost of near zero.

The economic case for electrifying the Australian car fleet is undebatable. We have the cheapest installed solar in the world — about US$0.55 per watt on rooftops — and an average single-family house with northerly aspect can run a five-seat car for nothing for most of the year. Every other country with this argument either has worse roofs, dearer panels, or both. Australia has no excuse.

Rooftop solar to EV: 2 cents per kilometre. Petrol: 18 cents. Our sun is cheaper than Middle Eastern oil and comes with far fewer moral headaches.

A tale of four countries

Now zoom out. Australia is not the only country squandering our foreign trade balance on a substance we don’t need; it is in fact the strangest one. Compare the Australian Sankey above with three others.

Figure 2 — New Zealand: oil supply and end use. Marsden Point closed in March 2022, so 100% of refined product now arrives by ship. South Korea (~39%) and Singapore (~33%) supply most of it; all domestic crude is exported. Consumes ~159 k b/d.

Figure 3 — Taiwan: oil supply and end use. 99.75% import-dependent on crude (~60% USA, ~40% Middle East). Two refineries — CPC Dalin and Formosa Mailiao — and a large petrochemical export sector. Consumes ~870 k b/d.

Figure 4 — United States: oil supply and end use. Net petroleum exporter since 2020. Produces ~12.9 M b/d of crude, consumes ~20 M b/d total. Transport is 66% of demand.

Look at the four diagrams together and the lesson is that every country's oil dependency has its own shape — so every country's escape route is different.

The United States is the only one of the four producing more than it consumes; its problem is not procurement but a cultural addiction to combustion. Twenty million barrels a day burned mostly in light vehicles and heavy trucks, locked in by sprawl and a powerful domestic industry that lobbies hard against efficiency rules. Its lever is fleet standards and the form of the post-WWII built environment.

Taiwan is the mirror image — 99.75% import-dependent on crude, sitting one strait closure away from a grounded economy, but with a dense urban form that already runs millions of electric scooters. Its lever is rapid EV adoption to complement the fastest two-wheeler electrification on earth. EVs aren't yet very popular in Taiwan; they should be. It's not as if there can be range anxiety — the whole island is less than 400 km north to south.

New Zealand has had no refinery at all since Marsden Point closed in March 2022, so 100% of refined product arrives by ship. It also has the cleanest grid in this group, mostly hydro, and a small enough fleet that EV penetration could erase petrol demand inside a generation. Its lever is transport electrification on top of clean electrons. My mate Mike Casey already runs an all-electric cherry farm at Forest Lodge Orchard including electric tractors, and has demonstrated that the economics in New Zealand are a slam dunk.

Australia is the strangest of the four: a minor exporter of crude and condensate, a major importer of refined product, with one of the highest per-capita oil burns in the OECD and a mining sector that runs on a $4.5 billion diesel subsidy. Our lever isn't like the others'. We can't credibly lecture importers about resilience while shipping 94% of our crude offshore. We can't out-EV Taiwan in scooters because we built suburbs (although we should try — unfortunately the current government is trying to stop kids from developing an electric two-wheeled habit before the revolution can even begin, by making punitive e-bike policy instead of figuring out ways for e-bikes to safely coexist with cars in communities around the country). We can't lean on hydro like New Zealand. What we can do is electrify the demand side hard — cars, trucks, mines, agriculture (and yes, the bikes that kids commute to school on) — using the world's cheapest sunshine, and shut down the policies that subsidise the legacy. Same problem, four geographies, four different fixes. Following other countries' playbooks but doing it slower is how we ended up here. We aren't even following the right countries' playbooks — we should look like Norway on EV policy, but we don't even look as good as California.

The Iran war should not have surprised anyone — and yet…

On June 22, 2025, the United States Air Force flew seven B-2 Spirit bombers to Ferdows, Natanz, and Isfahan and dropped fourteen Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Iran's nuclear program. Operation Midnight Hammer. The same day, the Iranian parliament voted to close the Strait of Hormuz — the 21-mile chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world's oil and LNG passes. The next day, Iran fired missiles at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. A ceasefire arrived on day twelve. The Strait stayed open. The Australian fuel system did not actually run out. We got lucky — again. But we did pay more, and we created super-profits for oil and gas companies — again — and we haven't made any political moves that demonstrate a true commitment to the short-, medium-, and long-term electrification of transport, personal and freight.

If we are being honest, the surprise was not that the Middle East had become unstable. It was that anyone in Canberra was acting as though it might stay stable. The Israeli occupation of Gaza after October 7, 2023 was itself a warning that the region would, as it has for over a century, return to violent reordering — precisely because imperial powers keep trying to control the oil and gas there. From the Anglo-Persian concessions of 1908, through the Mossadegh coup, through three Iraq wars, through the periodic American obsession with reshaping Venezuela's oil sector by force or sanction, the pattern is exactly the same. Empires fight over the molecules. Importers carry the bill. Australia is an importer.

So what has Canberra done since the bombs started falling on Ferdows?

It has bet on oil, not on electrification. Generously, the Energy Minister has done some good things on the household side. The **Cheaper Home Batteries Program** launched 1 July 2025 with a ~30% discount on home batteries from 5–100 kWh, expanded in December 2025 from $2.3 billion to $7.2 billion over four years — a serious commitment, projected to put batteries on two million households and 40 GWh of storage on the grid by 2030. The **Solar Sharer offer** announced for July 2026 will require retailers to give households at least three hours of free electricity in the middle of the day. These are excellent programs. They will cut household bills and absorb daytime solar. They are worth saying out loud.

But none of it touches the two largest oil-burning sectors in the country. Mining and our road vehicles are 80% of our oil problem. There is no equivalent of Cheaper Home Batteries for utes. There is no Solar Sharer for sedans and vans. The New Vehicle Efficiency Standard was watered down for utes at the request of Toyota, Ford and the FCAI in March 2024 — the 2029 emissions cut for Rangers and HiLuxes relaxed from 60% to 50%. The FBT exemption for plug-in hybrids was killed off on 1 April 2025, closing a transitional pathway at exactly the moment a transition was required. It should be noted that these vehicle standards are not even remotely commensurate with a 2-degree world of warming, let alone 1.5. That would require a phase-out date of something like 2030 or 2035. The government tells the public it is working on solving climate change, but the policies don’t add up. We are locking ourselves into expensive fuels and un-necessary warming.

The Fuel Tax Credits scheme — the diesel rebate that hands BHP, Rio, Fortescue and Hancock roughly $4.5 billion per year — remains untouched in our reactions to the war yet should be the first thing on the chopping block. All up, $10.7 billion in 2025–2026. The single largest fossil-fuel subsidy in the country, untouched. This is not the policy platform of a party that says it is serious about economics, let alone climate change.

At the export end, it gets worse. Labor tells us how hard they are working to move us to 80% renewables. This is deliberately vague. I have asked lots of punters in lots of audiences what they think this means, and they think it means 80% emissions reductions — but it is actually only a target for the existing electricity sector, not a target for all the new electricity we need to make to take the oil burners off the road. While pushing the "see how hard we work" line, they continue to commit the country to using fossil fuels to export fossil fuels to the world. In May 2024, the Future Gas Strategy informed Australians that gas extraction would continue "to 2050 and beyond." In September 2025, Environment Minister Murray Watt approved a 45-year extension of Woodside's North West Shelf LNG plant, locking it in to 2070. Browse, Scarborough's Pluto Train 2, Beetaloo, Barossa, Narrabri and Surat are all queued up behind.

This is deceitful, because most of the export emissions will happen in other countries (still causing the climate grief your children will encounter) — yet they don't go on Australia's carbon budget, due to historical errors in how we do this accounting that were lobbied for by previous Australian governments. The government uses this convenience to say they are delivering on climate yet everyone who cares feels these gut punches as the hypocrisy it is.

In March 2026, the Fuel Security Services Payment to Viva Geelong and Ampol Lytton — two refineries that meet 20% of demand between them — was extended from 2027 to 2030 with the margin cap nearly doubled. In April 2026, petrol and diesel excise was cut 60.9% for three months as cost-of-living relief, transferring every cent straight to the importers we are trying to escape. We are using taxpayer money to exacerbate our problems and our dependence on the companies that finance political misinformation and corrupt our democratic processes.

Here is the part that should make every taxpayer in the country furious: those gas exports — the ones we are extending the life of, approving new ones for, calling them "strategic" — THEY BARELY EARN AUSTRALIA ANYTHING. Norway used its gas revenues to build vehicle-charging networks and help Norwegians buy electric cars. We don't even seem to try to make revenues. The Petroleum Resource Rent Tax raises less revenue in a year than the federal government collects from the excise on beer. Norway runs a sovereign wealth fund worth US$1.7 trillion off its hydrocarbons. Qatar funds its entire welfare state on LNG. We give it away on legacy contracts negotiated when oil was $30 a barrel and watch the LNG tankers leave Karratha. We are not even getting paid to be a petrostate. We are other people's petrostate, and too stupid to profit from it.

We had every reason to electrify after the bombs hit Ferdows. We had a war in the chokepoint, a record trade deficit in fuel, the world's cheapest sunshine on our roofs, and a gas industry that doesn't even pay tax. We chose to subsidise diesel and approve another LNG terminal.

This is beyond a policy failure. It is a policy of doing nearly fuck-all, which is very much on brand for both of Australia's major parties. Sure, Labor at least believes in science; they just don't act on it.

The other things we keep paying for

Two more line items belong on the bill, because they are the same mistake in different clothing.

Sydney to Melbourne: The busiest air route in the southern hemisphere. In 2023, approximately 9.3 million passengers flew the corridor — 25,000 people per day, on a 713-kilometre trip that takes four hours door-to-door once you count airport time at both ends. Japan has been running the Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka — a comparable distance — for sixty years; it carries 150 million passengers per year. France built the TGV and made Paris–Lyon flying essentially extinct. A 300–350 km/h service from a Sydney city-centre station would cover Sydney–Melbourne in under three hours portal to portal, with no security theatre and no jet fuel. The corridor burns approximately $3–4 million in jet fuel every day. The High Speed Rail Authority is, as of writing, still doing planning. The question is not whether we can afford the train; it is whether we can afford to keep not building it. The only people to make money on high-speed rail in Australia are the big consulting firms — some of them not even ours. I wonder whether they keep writing unimaginative reports on why it's too hard or too expensive because they know they'll get paid to do the same job next year if the thing never gets built. We used to give this job to hard-working career bureaucrats who built Australia's infrastructure. My grandfather was one and ended up secretary of the Department of Main Roads. He would turn in his grave at our lack of institutional capacity within government to pull off projects as simple as a train track to Melbourne.

The diesel rebate: We keep paying to maintain the problem. Since 1957, Australia has refunded most of the fuel excise paid on diesel used off-road in mining, agriculture and forestry. Cost: ~$8–10 billion per year and rising. This is the largest single fossil-fuel subsidy in the country. Senator David Pocock has put the cumulative number at almost $60 billion to the biggest miners in under twenty years, with $84 billion more locked in by 2030 unless the scheme is reformed — and he is, conspicuously, one of the only members of federal parliament willing to say so out loud. The original justification was that fuel excise is a road-user charge and off-road users should not pay it. That made sense in 1957. In 2026, the mining industry is one of the most profitable sectors on earth. BHP and Rio do not need a multi-billion-dollar annual subsidy from Australian taxpayers. They need a price signal to electrify. On the 20-year savings Pocock quotes, you could simply buy the lowest-income 5 million households in Australia a new EV and in so doing save them all thousands of dollars a year. This is not government for the people; this is government for the plutocrats.
$8–10 billion a year in diesel rebates to the most profitable mining companies on earth? That money should be building the electric future, not a gift to fossil oligarchs.

We are not serious as a nation

I continue to naively believe Australia wishes to be a serious country. If we were, the government would do these things and they would not be expensive — most of them pay for themselves inside a decade.

1. Mandate EV sales targets. 100% zero-emission new light vehicles by 2035, 50% by 2030. NVES restored to its original 60% trajectory for utes. Means-tested purchase rebate funded out of the next FBT cycle. Reinstate the PHEV exemption as a transitional measure.

2. Build the heavy-vehicle charging corridor. $2 billion over five years for 350 kW depots at 150 km intervals on the five main freight corridors. 1 MW pantograph trials on the Sydney–Melbourne and Perth–Karratha runs.

3. Phase out the diesel fuel-tax rebate for large mining operations. Reduce the rate 20% per year over five years for operators with turnover above $50 million. Hypothecate the $5–7 billion/yr that comes back to the budget into transport electrification, fast rail, and co-financing of the first commercial mine-fleet electrifications. This is the lever Senator Pocock has been pulling on for two years; it is past time the government picked up the rope.

4. Commit to Sydney–Melbourne high-speed rail. Statutory authority with execution power. $5 billion for first-stage design and corridor reservation. Target operational 2045. Stop reviewing it; build it.

5. Build a real strategic petroleum reserve, and tax the gas. 90 days minimum, Australian-controlled storage on Australian soil, funded by a levy on petroleum imports and by a 25% export tax on LNG along the lines Senator Pocock has proposed. Norway-grade sovereign rent for a Norway-grade resource endowment.

6. Underwrite the world's first regional electric aircraft network. A 19-seat Australian-built or assembled electric aircraft, certified on a five-year timeline rather than a fifteen-year one, deployed first on the FIFO routes where the economics are unbeatable, and then on every regional commuter line under 500 km. Use ARENA and the NRF to take real first-of-a-kind risk on the airframe, the battery pack and the charging architecture — the way the US underwrote the first commercial jets in the 1950s.

7. Build the infrastructure for safe e-bikes and light electric mobility. Stop punishing kids for developing the good habit of riding light electric vehicles to school and to work. Give them protected lanes, sensible speed limits, and a national regulatory framework that distinguishes a 25 km/h cargo bike from an unregistered motorbike — and in so doing build the culture and conditions for a healthier, cheaper, lower-carbon mobility for the next generation.

None of this is radical. Every item has been implemented somewhere less sunny, less windy, and less wealthy than Australia. The only thing standing between us and energy independence is the political will to stop subsidising the problem and start building the solutions.

We hand $165 million a day to foreign oil producers and call it an energy policy. We give away gas worth more than the government makes on taxing our beer and call it a trade strategy. We approve another LNG terminal three months after the Strait of Hormuz nearly closes and call it national security.

These are choices. Like all choices, they can and should be changed. Albo should stand up, give a nation-building speech about the all-electric future we are building towards, and start helping Australians understand what is in it for them — cheaper bills, a better economy, a healthier environment, and a solution to climate change. It's far past time for leadership, but it is never too late. Canada’s Mark Carney has shown how the world can reject America’s leadership where that leadership is heading us astray. Albo should do the same.

Figure data

Sources for the four oil-flow Sankey diagrams. Each figure shows flows indexed to 100; absolute consumption volumes are listed in the captions above.

Figure 1 — Australia. Sources: EIA Australia Country Analysis Brief (Dec 2025); Geoscience Australia AECR 2025; BITRE Australian Infrastructure & Transport Statistics Yearbook 2023; Australian Energy Update 2024 (DCCEEW); ATSE, Decarbonising Diesel Industries (2024); ABARE/UTS (2010); Worldometer/CEIC 2024; ELGAS Australian Petroleum Statistics 2025.

Figure 2 — New Zealand. Sources: MBIE, Energy in New Zealand 2024; MBIE Oil Statistics quarterly 2024; WITS Comtrade bilateral trade 2023; Worldometer 2024; Wikipedia, "Oil and gas industry in New Zealand" (updated 2025); IEA New Zealand country profile 2024.

Figure 3 — Taiwan. Sources: M. Boone, "Securing Taiwan's Black Gold," Global Taiwan Institute Brief 8(17), Sep 2023; CPC Corporation Annual Report 2024; Enerdata Taiwan Energy Market Report 2024; Worldometer 2024; Wikipedia, "Energy in Taiwan" (updated 2025); Stanford/Chen, "Analysis of Oil Refining in Taiwan," PH240 (2024).

Figure 4 — United States. Sources: EIA Monthly Energy Review (April 2025), Tables 3.5, 3.7a–c; EIA FAQs (March 2024); EIA, "Use of Oil" (Aug 2023); EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2023; AFDC/EIA petroleum production & trade chart 1949–2024.

References & data sources

1. AU production/imports: EIA Australia Country Analysis Brief, Dec 2025; Geoscience Australia AECR 2025; Worldometer/CEIC 2024

2. AU mining diesel: ATSE, Decarbonising Diesel Industries, 2024; ACAPMA renewable diesel consultation, 2024; IEEFA, "Mining's costly diesel addiction must be a budget priority," 2024

3. AU diesel tax rebate: Australian Budget Papers 2024–25 and 2025–26; DCCEEW Fuel Tax Credits scheme data; Australia Institute, "Australia's Fuel Tax Credit and fossil fuel subsidies" (May & Oct 2024); Senator David Pocock, "On Fossil Fuel Subsidies" (davidpocock.com.au)

4. AU EV costs: RACV EV running cost analysis 2024; Clean Energy Council EV report 2024; ARENA solar cost data

5. AU Cheaper Home Batteries: energy.gov.au "Cheaper Home Batteries Program"; DCCEEW December 2025 expansion announcement; RenewEconomy, "Cheaper Home Batteries 2.0" (Apr 2026)

6. AU Solar Sharer: Minister Bowen media release "Next steps for Solar Sharer Offer" (Nov 2025); pv-magazine, "Australia plans nationwide three-hour free solar power offer from July 2026" (Nov 2025)

7. AU Future Gas Strategy: DCCEEW & Minister King, *Future Gas Strategy*, May 2024; Australia Institute analysis; SBS News, "A more dangerous future" (May 2024)

8. NVES weakening: WhichCar, "New Vehicle Efficiency Standard watered-down for utes, vans and off-road SUVs" (Mar 2024); IEA Policies database, Australia NVES 2025–2029; nvesregulator.gov.au

9. FBT changes: ATO, "Electric cars exemption" and "FBT on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles"; Grant Thornton, "FBT exemption phase-out for PHEVs effective from 1 April 2025"

10. NWS / gas approvals: Hon. Murray Watt MP, North West Shelf approval (Sep 2025); Crikey/The Conversation, "Six other giant gas projects to watch" (Jun 2025); Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, "Australia Gas" comment (Apr 2025)

11. Refinery subsidy / FSSP: Argus Media, "Australia extends subsidy plan for refiners to 2030" (Mar 2026); Capital Brief, "Federal government lifts financial support for Viva Energy, Ampol fuel refineries"; Petrolmate, "Australia Runs on 28 Days of Fuel" (Jan 2026)

12. Fuel excise cut Apr–Jun 2026: ABF Customs Notice 2026-04; Bloomberg, "Australia Broadens Fuel Tax Cut" (Apr 2026)

13. Iran war 2025: Wikipedia, "2025 United States strikes on Iranian nuclear sites"; Congressional Research Service IN12571; NPR, "U.S. strikes 3 nuclear sites in Iran" (21 Jun 2025); Arms Control Association, "Israel and U.S. Strike Iran's Nuclear Program" (Jul 2025); UN Security Council emergency meeting press release (22 Jun 2025)

14. PRRT vs beer excise: Senator David Pocock, motion calling for inquiry into PRRT vs beer excise revenue (2024); Australia Institute, "Australia's gas ripoff cuts across political lines"

15. HSR comparisons: BITRE fast rail analysis; Infrastructure Australia reviews; JR Central Tokaido Shinkansen Annual Report 2023; SNCF TGV ridership statistics; HSRA Corporate Plan 2025-26 to 2028-29; HSRA Sydney–Newcastle business case (Dec 2024)

16. Electric trucks (AU): New Energy Transport; The Driven, "Faster, and a lot cheaper: First all-electric long haul delivery flags new era in Australia trucking" (Mar 2026)

17. Forest Lodge Orchard: Mike Casey, electriccherries.nz / forestlodge.nz; Otago Daily Times, "Turning cherry orchard electric pays off"

Pax Electricana

Saul Griffith — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 05:48:18 GMT

Its Climate week in San Francisco. I’m doing an event on monday evening at my office on what one possible future where the middle power countries work on electrification of industrial decarbonization as our only real path to zero emissions.

“Pax Electricana”

https://luma.com/qqy6hknc

My first proper jobs were in a steel rolling mill and an aluminium recycling smelter. I’ve always loved the roar of industry and the glow of molten metal — the heat that hits you thirty metres from the furnace, the noise that vibrates your teeth. There’s something honest about it. Physics you can feel.

I now spend most of my time living in a steel town - Wollongong - and I think a lot about the 25–40% of emissions from industry (depending on whether you count direct or indirect) and how we will address them. These are oft called "hard to abate" sectors. Every time I walk through a steel plant, I think the same thing: every tonne of coking coal in that blast furnace was shipped from somewhere. Every BTU of heat started as ancient carbon, bought and sold on commodity markets shaped by wars and cartels and geologies that no engineer chose. The whole edifice of modern industry was built atop a logistical machine designed to move molecules from where geology left them to where people burn them. That machine is what we have to replace — not with white papers, but with better machines and new supply chains and industrial electrification.

For context some graphs, and thanks to Claude for helping me put them together. I have to say, i’m impressed with the data processing and figuring skills of our new AIs. The first graph shows you the treemap of what our big industrial consumers are. The two pie charts are primary energy by source, and what portion of primary energy goes to making "stuff".

Figure 1: The industrial economy by sector. Twenty-five to forty percent of global emissions come from making physical things — steel, cement, chemicals, aluminium — the "hard to abate" sectors that can’t simply switch to a battery.

Figures 2 & 3: Top— global primary energy by source; fossil fuels still account for 500 of 620 EJ, over 80%. Bottom — energy by end use; around 120 EJ is embodied in manufactured materials. Data: EI Statistical Review 2025.

Here’s a number that frames the whole argument. About 120 EJ of fossil fuels cross borders every year — on tankers, through pipelines, in bulk carriers. Oil accounts for roughly 60% of that, gas 25%, coal 15%. And about 120 EJ of energy goes into manufacturing the world’s materials — steel, cement, chemicals, aluminium, plastics, paper. We ship 120 EJ of fuel across oceans so that countries can burn it to make things. The Pax Electricana thesis is: what if we shipped the things instead? Green iron made with Australian solar. Aluminium smelted with Canadian hydro. Lithium refined with Chilean wind. The energy doesn’t cross the border — the material does, with the clean energy already inside it.

The Order That Was

There was a time when global stability rode on oil tankers and aircraft carriers. The late twentieth century’s world order — call it Pax Americana — was built on fossil fuels, US dollar liquidity, and the security of oil shipping lanes. Whoever controlled oil chokepoints and had access to cheap fossil energy shaped the terms of global trade and security.

But let’s not be sentimental about what that order actually was. It wasn’t peace. It was détente between those with guns — a managed standoff underwritten by structural violence in the form of proxy wars, structural adjustment programs, and injustice that billions of people did not experience as peaceful. The colonial period that preceded it only formally ended in the second half of the twentieth century, and its aftershocks never stopped. The United States dropped more ordnance on Vietnam than all sides used in the entirety of World War II. The Middle East was carved up by oil concessions drawn on maps in London and Washington. Latin America was subjected to a rolling series of coups and austerity programs designed to keep commodity flows moving in the right direction. When people talk about the "rules-based order," they mostly mean rules written by the countries that controlled the oil.

That world does seem to be grinding to a halt.

At the World Economic Forum, Mark Carney reframed the coming era as one defined not by hydrocarbons but by capital allocation, climate risk, and geoeconomic fragmentation. Capital markets are beginning to price climate risk, supply-chain brittleness, and policy uncertainty into asset valuations. Investors are increasingly wary of long-dated projects whose underlying value relies on fossil supply dependencies or fragile shipping corridors. The financial architecture is shifting underneath the old order.

Meanwhile, the world’s two dominant industrial powers — the United States and China — are each advancing rival industrial and technological spheres. China around electrification, semiconductors, batteries, and critical materials, America currently a schizophrenic mix of electrification and fossil fuels, AI and compute. Both are mobilising state capacity to accelerate domestic supply chains. Both are tightening trade perimeters and integrating economic power with security imperatives. India is staking its claim as a third pole, which the demographics of the coming decades will make undeniable. Whether it’s G1, G2, or G3, the big powers are big powering.

In this context, middle powers — states large enough to matter, yet too small to dominate — face a choice: drift in a unipolar petro-legacy order, become satellites of a superpower bloc, or forge a new industrial architecture that neutralises over-reliance on any single geopolitical pole. Electrification makes this new path possible.

Figure 4: Global crude oil trade flows (2024). A handful of producers — Saudi Arabia, Russia, the US, Iraq, UAE — supply the world. The width of each flow is proportional to energy content in exajoules. Looping green lines represent domestic self-consumption.

The Petro-Bloc

Here’s an uncomfortable pattern. Look at the countries whose national wealth depends on continued fossil fuel extraction: the United States (now the world’s largest oil and gas producer), Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Venezuela — and, yes, Australia. I’m going to call this alignment the petro-bloc. Not because they coordinate formally (although OPEC+ certainly bloody does), but because their economic incentives all point in the same direction: slow the energy transition, protect the value of their underground assets, and maintain the leverage that comes from controlling a commodity the world depends on. They’ll call it "energy security." They’ll call it "energy realism." They’ll fund think tanks and lobbyists and friendly journalists to tell you that the transition is too expensive, too slow, too unreliable. It’s the same playbook the tobacco industry ran for decades — defend the product, attack the alternatives, buy time. The fingerprints of the global gas industry are all over the on-line misinformation about wind turbines and battery fires and range anxiety.

Why did I include Australia in this category? It is rapidly expanding its domestic electrification with lots of solar and batteries. But Australia is a petrostate. Coal and LNG exports are the single largest contributor to the national trade balance. These export businesses are dominated by multinationals that lean on international trade agreements to keep new projects in the pipeline against the wishes of the general public. If you live in Brisbane or Perth and you squint, the economy looks like Qatar with better beaches. Pretending otherwise is the first step toward failing to change it.

The US is the biggest player in this petro-bloc. Recent US policy moves — rollbacks on clean energy mandates, revived fossil production support, diplomatic outreach that accommodates export-oriented hydrocarbons — signal a willingness to lean into fossil diplomacy. What were Trump’s tariffs if not the extortionary pressure to force US LNG on the world. The petro-bloc consolidates geopolitical influence among energy-rich states, reinforces infrastructure and capital flows around combustion technologies, and perpetuates dependencies for importers locked into liquid fuels and gas grids well beyond the point where electricity would be cheaper.

The petro-bloc’s power comes from concentration and scarcity. A handful of geologies, a handful of chokepoints, a handful of companies. When supply gets tight, they win. When demand falls, they lose. Their entire strategic posture depends on the world continuing to need what they have.

Figure 5: Global natural gas trade — LNG (tanker) and pipeline flows (2024). The US, Russia, Qatar, and Australia dominate exports. Japan, South Korea, and the EU are the most exposed importers. Looping green lines represent domestic self-consumption.

The LNG Trap

Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — three of the more technologically sophisticated countries on earth — are dangerously dependent on imported liquefied natural gas. Japan is the world’s largest LNG importer (they also export a lot, and this trade complicates their decarbonization pathways and political economy). Korea and Taiwan aren’t far behind. Together they spent well over $100 billion per year importing the stuff before the Ukraine shock, and more since.

LNG is an inefficient way to move energy. You take natural gas, cool it to −162°C (which itself consumes about 10% of the energy in the gas), load it onto a specialised tanker, ship it around the world, then regasify it at the other end (losing another few percent). Then you burn it in a power plant at maybe 40–60% efficiency or burn it directly for heat in industry. The round-trip efficiency is poor and all the effort makes it far more expensive that pipeline gas. It also leaks and causes fugitive emissions. Climate accounting struggles to accomodate that, and so they don’t pay for it.

Who is selling them this expensive, inefficient gas? Increasingly, the United States. In 2025 the US became the first country to export more than 100 million metric tonnes of LNG in a single year — 111 million tonnes, a 24% jump. Asian spot prices bounced around $10–12 per MMBtu through 2025, with forecasts trending to $9–10 for 2026. That sounds like a price decline, until you compare it to locally generated solar electricity, which in Australia delivers useful energy at one-fifth to one-tenth the cost.

The deeper problem isn’t the price. It’s the dependency. When your energy system depends on a global commodity shipped from politically volatile suppliers on spot markets subject to war premiums and hurricane disruptions, your economy is perpetually exposed. Ask Europe how that worked out with Russian gas. See what is happening right now in the straight of Hormuz.

Figure 6: Oil, gas, and coal — who produces, who trades, who consumes. Click to enlarge. Three views of the same dependencies: fossil fuels flow from a small number of geologies to the factories and cities of the world. If you’re a large exporter of fuels today, start thinking about how to offset that with exports of manufactured materials instead. If you’re a large importer of energy, think about importing it as materials — green iron, aluminium, refined lithium — not as LNG to make those materials locally.

Industry Is the Hard Frontier

For transport, buildings, and the residential and commercial sectors, the argument about electrons versus molecules is settled. Electrons win. Electric motors convert 90–95% of energy to motion versus 25% for combustion engines. Heat pumps move 3–4 units of heat for every unit of electricity. Batteries have fallen 97% in cost since 1991. Solar has fallen 90% in fifteen years. In Australia, rooftop solar installs at (US)$0.55 per watt — the financed cost of that electricity is 2–3 US cents per kilowatt-hour. If free fusion energy magically appeared tomorrow, it could not deliver electricity to your house cheaper than rooftop solar already does in Australia. This is because the cost of the electricity network is the dominant cost of electricity - which is why rooftop solar behind the meter is always the first priority in making a lowest cost energy system. Rewiring Australia’s data shows the average household saves $4,000–5,000 per year by going all-electric. Rewiring Aotearoa calculated $11 billion per year in savings for New Zealand. These numbers were before the price shock of the latest stupid oil war awhich probably adds another $2000 per year in savings. The wins for residential and transport electrification stack up: cheaper energy, local jobs, better air quality, reduced inequality.

But industry is different. Making steel, aluminium, cement, and chemicals with clean electricity is not yet obviously cheaper than doing it with fossil fuels. Coal as a source of heat for industrial processes is under 0.5c/kWh equivalent. Natural gas if you are close to a pipeline is 1-2c/kWh. The blast furnace has had 150 years of optimisation. Electrochemical iron reduction is still a process in the lab. Industrial heat above 1,000°C is still mostly delivered by burning things. The molecules-to-electrons transition in heavy industry requires not just cheap electricity but new processes, new equipment, new supply chains, and patient capital willing to back first-of-a-kind plants and long and uncertain capital cycles.

The simple way I think about it is that success in any industrial vertical needs cheap electrons, a more efficient process and a reliable input supply chain - typically ores. As an example South Australian solar and wind with an electrochemical iron pathway looks like the viable pathway by which iron and steel will get cheaper while also decarbonizing. Iron pathways through LNG or hydrogen will almost certainly make steel more expensive. People don’t like commodities getting more expensive.

Steel and aluminium, while hard, look doable — the electrochemistry exists, the economics are closing, and first commercial plants are under construction. Cement is the really tough nut. About 60% of cement’s CO₂ comes from the chemical reaction itself (calcining limestone), not from the fuel burned to heat the kiln. You can’t fix that by switching to clean electricity alone. But there are promising angles. Some kilns already burn waste — tyres, municipal refuse, biomass — as fuel, which can be even cheaper than coal and diverts material from landfill. And a new line of research on industrial co-production (Finke, Wagner et al., 2025) argues that multi-product electrochemical pathways — making cement clinker alongside other valuable outputs — could achieve cost-neutral electrification once manufacturing scales. Single-product electrochemistry struggles to beat a coal kiln on cost; co-production changes the equation by spreading capital costs across multiple revenue streams.

The easy electrification — cars, homes, commercial buildings — is happening whether governments help or not, because the economics are compelling. America’s diabolical political and regulatory environment, combined with its cheap local gas, is why it is going much slower than places that don’t have their political processes corrupted by the oil and gas lobby. New Zealand, Vietnam, Pakistan - they are invested in moving away from fossil fuels because they aren’t producers. The hard decarbonization is industrial electrification. This is where geopolitics, strategy, and deliberate coalition-building matter. It’s where the next world order will be forged.

Historically steel production was located where metallurgical coal and good ores came together near ports. Places like Wollongong and Pittsburgh. Newcastle and the other Newcastle. Then Asia got into the game with cheap ore shipped from places like Western Australia and coal and LNG. The same is true of aluminium (very often near hydroelectricity), cement, and chemical production including petrochemicals. The new industry that makes things cheaper, and greener, will be where the material flows meet the cheap clean energy flows. Another underappreciated thing will be the advantage of new processes with low capital costs - if you can keep the capex low enough you will be able to operate the machinery when the wind blows and the sun shines, and throttle it down when it doesn’t. Given that the price of electricity is frequently negative in countries with high renewables penetration, figuring out how to maximise the portion of your production that you can do when energy is even better than free will return great dividends and is part of the toolbox for making new industrial processes cheaper than the old.

It will also mean a lot less shipping. 50% of the worlds shipping is moving fossil fuels. If you shipped iron instead of iron ore and the fossil fuels to make it, you would cut the tonnage by 2/3 or more. Shipping is 2% of global energy and more of emissions, so this is a good thing.

Figure 7: 18 of the materials that make the modern world — who mines them, who processes them, who uses them. Every row is a supply chain that electrification will reshape. The chart also shows the extraordinary rise of China as a manufacturing giant — dominant in processing across nearly every material category.

Trade in Embodied Clean Energy

Here’s the conceptual shift that matters: you can’t really export electricity. It’s hard to ship. Wires aren’t (yet) crossing oceans. The oft touted alternative - hydrogen is a poor way to ship energy — the round-trip efficiency of electrolysis, compression, transport, and reconversion is so poor that you lose 60–70% of the energy - even worse than LNG. It’s thermodynamic madness, and I’ve been saying this for years while the hydrogen lobby (which basically is the oil and gas lobby) extract billions in government subsidies for what amounts to fossil fuel industry life support.

But you can export materials that have clean energy embodied in them. About 1/4-1/2 of the cost of steel is energy. Around 30% of aluminium is energy. Cheap electricity will enable green iron, green aluminium, refined lithium, and battery-grade materials at globally competitive prices, with near-zero emissions.

This is already happening. The Australian government’s Green Iron Investment Fund has put $1 billion into decarbonising steel. CSIRO’s Green Metals Innovation Network launched in 2025. Fortescue is building a commercial green iron plant at Christmas Creek. A green steel recycling mill in Collie, Western Australia will produce 450,000 tonnes of rebar annually from 2026. Australia’s iron ore exports were worth $116 billion in 2025–26, and projections suggest green iron could grow that to $386 billion by 2060.

The trade of the future isn’t tankers of LNG. It’s shiploads of green iron and aluminium and lithium (and ammonia and copper and ...) — molecules that carry clean electrons inside them. The new industrial machine doesn’t ship fuel. It ships the things that fuel used to build.

Figure 8: Global iron ore flows. Australia and Brazil mine it, China and the world’s blast furnaces consume it. Green iron — reduced with clean electricity instead of coking coal — would restructure this entire supply chain.

Pax Electricana

I call this alternative strategy Pax Electricana: stability underwritten not by oil chokepoints and carrier groups, but through electrification, decentralised industrial alliances, and shared resilience — a framework that hedges against a fossil-fuel bloc and the fragmentation of global trade. Is it inevitable ? If we are ever to address climate change it is.

The sun shines everywhere. The wind blows in every ocean. Lithium, copper, nickel, cobalt, silicon — the minerals of the electric stack — exist on every continent, in dozens of countries. The electric world is inherently distributed. No single country controls the sun.

If the petro-bloc alignment persists, electrification becomes not merely a climate or economic policy choice but a strategic hedge against a fossil-aligned geopolitical order. Pax Electricana builds that hedge by creating alternative industrial supply chains anchored in clean electrification and diversified partnerships among middle powers.

Figure 9: Global bauxite flows. Australia, Guinea, and Indonesia mine the ore; China refines most of it into alumina and then aluminium. Smelting aluminium is one of the most electricity-intensive industries on earth — whoever has the cheapest clean electrons wins this one.

The Middle Power Coalition

So who builds this thing? Not China alone, and not America alone. The superpowers are both too conflicted. China dominates manufacturing of the electric stack but is a geopolitical risk for anyone building a supply chain that depends on a single source. The US has extraordinary innovation but governance so politically volatile that climate policy reverses every four years — the IRA giveth, the Big Beautiful Bill taketh away.

The answer is the middle powers. Individually constrained, collectively formidable. Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the European Union, Chile, Mexico, and eventually many more. Countries that are either major mineral holders, major manufacturers, major renewable energy suppliers, major technology developers, or major energy importers looking for a way out. Often several of these at once. And whether the big powers end up in a G1, G2, or G3 configuration, the middle powers need a strategy that doesn’t depend on how that race shakes out.

Australia is a great example - it has the minerals, the solar resource, and the land — and the uncomfortable truth that it currently earns its living as a petrostate. That’s not a contradiction. It’s a motivation. Canada under Mark Carney has signalled a clean-energy industrial strategy — transition bonds, carbon contracts for difference, a sustainable investment taxonomy — though Carney himself is torn, as any leader of a major oil and gas exporter must be. Japan and Korea have the manufacturing sophistication and the most urgent motivation to escape LNG dependency. Europe has the market size, the regulatory infrastructure, and — crucially — the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which creates demand pull-through for low-embodied carbon materials from trusted partners. Europe provides not just demand but regulatory consistency and financial market depth — a glue that binds industrial partners across regions. Chile has lithium and copper. Taiwan has semiconductor fabrication. Latin America broadly offers extraordinary solar and wind potential alongside growing domestic markets.

No country can do this alone. But together they constitute a supply chain for the entire electric stack — from mine to module to motor to manufactured machine — that doesn’t depend on a single superpower. This trade architecture is the core of Pax Electricana -- reciprocal partnerships where everyone can move up the food chain. Australia shipping green iron and aluminium and refined lithium moves up from mining through to value added processing. Japan and Korea - geographically constrained in terms of renewables - get to spend a higher portion of their economy making the ships and cars that are higher value exports. Taiwan gets to dedicate more of its energy economy to ships, and less on the basic inputs like iron enabling it to decarbonize and increase its export values. Canada can supply critical minerals and maybe even cheaper aluminium given its hydro capacity. Chile can contribute lithium and copper. A Pacific and Atlantic lattice of production nodes that enhances resilience and reduces reliance on any single geopolitical corridor. Not a military alliance. A manufacturing alliance. Just as the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe through industrial investment, not charity, Pax Electricana can do the same for the clean economy.

And here’s the part people miss when they think only about hardware: talent and knowledge sharing for rapid deployment of electrotech. The middle powers collectively have an extraordinary depth of engineering talent, trade skills, and institutional knowledge. Coordinating that — shared demonstration facilities for green steel and long-duration storage, aligned standards for low-carbon materials, reciprocal capital programmes, integrated workforce training — is what turns a loose coalition into an industrial mesh. Not a bloc defined by exclusion. A network creating redundancy, reducing exposure to single-point supply chain failures, and actively reducing the leverage of the petro-bloc.

Figure 10: Global alumina flows. The intermediate step between bauxite and aluminium — refined at high temperatures, shipped globally, and increasingly concentrated in China. A middle power coalition needs alternative refining capacity.

The Three Billion

There’s one more piece of this coalition that most Western analysts completely miss, and it might be the most important. South and Southeast Asia — Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan — along with large parts of Africa, represent nearly three billion people who are right now going from hundreds of kilowatt-hours per person per year to thousands. That’s the trajectory every developing economy follows, and it is the single largest source of demand for the electro-stack on Earth.

These countries don’t want to repeat the fossil dependency trap. They can’t afford LNG at Asian spot prices. They have abundant solar resources. What they need is affordable electric technology — heat pumps, EVs, solar panels, batteries — manufactured at scale and financed at reasonable rates. A middle power coalition that can supply that stack has enormous leverage and enormous goodwill. There is power in a union with them on this. Africa too. The countries building the clean industrial supply chain won’t just be trading with each other — they’ll be equipping the fastest-growing energy markets in the world.

Figure 11: Global copper flows. Chile and Peru mine it, China refines it. Copper is the metal of electrification — every motor, transformer, cable, and circuit board needs it. Demand will roughly double by 2040.

Working With China

Lets be clear about China - it dominates manufacturing of solar panels, batteries, and EVs, and just about everything else. You can’t build the electric stack at global scale without Chinese manufacturing, at least not yet.

But we shouldn’t build a system that requires China. The lesson of Europe’s dependency on Russian gas applies here too. Supply chain concentration is a systemic risk, regardless of which country sits at the centre.

The middle power strategy is about building redundancy. Multiple sources for critical minerals. Multiple manufacturing bases for batteries and power electronics. Not decoupling, but de-risking. The goal is a system resilient enough that no single country’s political decisions can switch off your energy transition.

Figure 12: Global coal trade flows (2024). Indonesia, Australia, and Russia are the major exporters; China and India the major importers. Coal is both the dirtiest fuel and the cheapest source of industrial heat — the hardest molecule to displace.

The American Waiting Room

And America? Its innovation engine remains extraordinary, though Elon Musk’s chainsaw might have killed Vannevar Bush’s inspired post war innovation infrastructure - the universities and national labs. The fundamental science behind the electric stack — lithium-ion chemistry, power semiconductors, advanced magnetics — came overwhelmingly from US-funded research, often by immigrant scientists at publicly-funded universities. That brain trust still exists, even as the political superstructure lurches between climate action and climate denial every electoral cycle. Right now it might be a matter of saving the American brains that aren’t distracted by AI, and giving them a useful place to deploy this technology while this administration is hostile.

The middle powers can serve as a continuity mechanism. When US policy is hostile, the people and the IP and the companies don’t disappear — they need somewhere to go. Australia, Canada, Europe, and Japan can host demonstration projects, scale-up factories, and policy testbeds for technologies that the US invented but can’t currently deploy at home. Think of it as a waiting room for American clean tech, keeping the lights on until the politics change again.

This is what Carney’s Canada is positioning for. It’s what Australia’s "Future Made in Australia" industrial policy is about. It’s what the EU’s Green Deal Industrial Plan aspires to be. Individually, these are national programs. Collectively, they are the scaffolding of Pax Electricana. They do need more coordination.

Industrial Clusters: Demonstration Over Theory

The way this gets built is not with white papers. It’s with industrial clusters — specific places where cheap electricity, mineral supply, port access, and skilled labour converge. There are only so many places in the world where it makes sense to make iron, and fewer that are in close proximity to cheap renewables. If nuclear could produce electricity at 2-3c/kWh it would be in the running, but thats not a reality today and no serious nuclear companies are forecasting getting there soon. So the likeliest scenarios is that the first places to build these facilities are the places that are first to have cheap renewables close to the right geological deposits.

Low cost of Capital Is the Whole Ballgame

Cheap electricity is the decisive advantage. Pipeline gas in the US costs under 1 cent per kilowatt-hour of heat. By the time you build a power plant and burn it, electricity generation costs 3–5 cents before transmission and distribution. LNG landed in Asia costs 4–9 cents per kilowatt-hour — just for the fuel, before conversion losses. Australian solar or Canadaian hydroelectricity can deliver at 2 cents (US units here). Below 4 cents, the economics of green industrial production flip. Australia is already there. Parts of Chile are there with solar and wind. The Middle East is there with solar (ironic, given they’re sitting on the oil). Whoever can credibly offer sub-4-cent clean electricity to industrial users at scale with colocated inputs will attract the capital.

And this is where Mark Carney’s insight becomes the whole ballgame. Carney — now Prime Minister of Canada, previously the guy who ran both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada — has been saying for years that climate risk is financial risk, and that credibility lowers the cost of capital. He’s right, and it matters more than most people realise. A green iron project financed at 4% has a completely different economics than one financed at 8%. The difference between those numbers isn’t engineering — it’s trust. Stable governance, transparent legal systems, long-term policy commitment — these are the things that make institutional capital flow. Canada’s new transition bonds, Australia’s Future Made in Australia plan, the EU taxonomy — these aren’t just climate policy. They’re financial infrastructure. They’re the reason middle powers can offer something the petro-bloc fundamentally cannot: a credible long-term bet on the clean economy - but they will need to make that commitment together as producers and offtakers.

This matters existentially for the pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and insurance pools of middle power countries — institutions holding vast capital that needs steady, secure returns through the coming decades. Coordinated electrification and supply-chain diversification lowers systemic risk and the cost of capital. Countries that internalise this reduce risk and attract long-term investment. Countries that don’t will find their capital fleeing to those that did. Capital follows credibility.

And the other important thing is low cost capex

Solar and wind are intermittent, everyone who wants to criticize the energy transition mentions that, but if you can design new manufacturing processes that are low in capex and can then be run intermittently, it increases the portion of time you can run on the cheapest electrons - the noon-time ones in a solar rich country. Ideally now you think of how to design plant equipment that doesn’t need to run 24/7, but run 18 hours a day and runs most intensively around noon when the sun is strongest. Colocation of solar and wind so the blend has a capacity factor of 70% paired with low CAPEX plant that can run at 70% is the secret.

Two World Orders

So here we are. Two competing visions of how the world organises itself around energy.

The Petro-Bloc offers fossil fuels, concentrated power, price volatility, geological luck, and periodic and expensive disruptions. It is extractive, inherently scarce, and controlled by a small number of actors - increasingly bad. Its golden age is behind it.

Pax Electricana offers electrification, distributed power, resilience, and engineering. It is manufactured, inherently abundant, and open to any country willing to invest. Its golden age is just beginning.

The middle powers didn’t ask for this role. They’d probably prefer that the superpowers got their act together. But waiting for Washington to lead is insane, and although Beijing is leading, we need diversity and a hedge. The technology is nearly ready. The supply chains are buildable. What’s needed is the political imagination to see that a coalition of middle powers — messy, multilateral, imperfect — is the entity best positioned to build a clean industrial order that works for everyone. And America won’t operate cohesively, so we should not write off that California and Washington State might be in the Pax where their wealth and talent.

Whats hard about Pax Electricana

These are tremendously difficult political things to do. Local politics are driven by jobs. No one wants to see their steel mill shut down or smelter go away as entire geographic economies rely on them. Yet Pax Electricana acknowledges that there will be a new geography of different economic winners. This is the tension within Nation States. Politically important cities and regions will look to the state to prop-up existing industries rather than build a-new or elsewhere. It might be a better idea for Taiwan to ditch iron making in Taiwan for both cost and climate reasons, but the people of Taichung and the owners of those steel plants will fracture the politics. This might be Japans pathway to decarbonization with a thriving industrial sector, but it runs counter to the fact that Japan is the LNG hub to the world today. A new kind of diplomacy will be required to pull together these projects that require local buy-in, international capital, and multi-country participation in the products.

The old world was forged in carbon. The new one will be forged in silicon, lithium, copper, green iron and aluminium — refined with clean electrons and traded between nations that chose to build rather than extract.

There is something deeper here, something that goes beyond economics and strategy. The fossil era was defined by power over — over colonies, over shipping lanes, over populations held hostage to commodity prices they couldn’t control. Electrification enables power within. Within countries, within communities, within households. A rooftop solar panel is a tiny act of sovereignty. A green steel mill is a big one. When countries can generate their own energy and manufacture their own industrial materials, they exercise power with their partners rather than having power exercised over them. That shift — from extraction to generation, from dependence to interdependence — is what makes Pax Electricana not just a strategy for prosperity, but a fundamentally different kind of world order.

The middle powers now have a choice. Forge a resilient, electrified industrial order — or be forged by the rival blocs shaping the new century and in some cases trying to force fossil on us forever.

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References

- Not Boring — The Electric Slide by Packy McCormick

- Ember — Global Electricity Review 2026 / Energy Security & Fossil Fuel Fragility

- Rewiring Australia — Castles & Cars / Tipping Point Report

- Rewiring Aotearoa — Tomorrow Report

- World Economic Forum — Australia and Green Iron

- CSIRO — Green Metals Innovation Network

- EIA — US LNG Exports

- Mark Carney Climate Strategy

- LNG Prices in 2026 — Energy Tracker Asia

- The ANVIL — Australian Industrial Decarbonisation Demonstrator (Saul Griffith / Rewiring Australia, Aug 2025)

- IEA — Industry Tracking: Direct industrial CO₂ emissions ~9.4 GT/yr (2023), or ~25% of 37.4 GT global fossil CO₂. Including indirect emissions from electricity, industry accounts for ~40%.

- IPCC AR6 WGIII Chapter 11 — Industry (Bashmakov et al., 2022): Direct industrial CO₂ ~9.0 GT/yr (2019), or ~25% of 36.3 GT global fossil CO₂ (2021). Of that, ~25–30% is process emissions (chemical reactions in cement, steel, etc.), ~70–75% is energy/combustion.

- Rissman et al. (2020), "Technologies and policies to decarbonize global industry," Nature Climate Change 10, 269–277.

- IEA — Energy Technology Perspectives 2020

- IEA — World Energy Balances: Cross-border fossil fuel trade ~122 EJ/yr (2022), derived from exports rows for crude oil, oil products, natural gas, and coal.

- Finke, Albertson, McKay, Rajan, McFarland, Gill-Wiehl, Kammen & Wagner (2025), "Co-production as an Economically Feasible Pathway to Economy-Wide Electrification," preprint (Nature Portfolio).

- JRC — In a low-carbon world, trade in fossil fuels plummets (2023): Oil ~60% of traded energy, gas ~25%, coal ~15%.

Let’s get the rules on e-bikes (and the physics) right.

Saul Griffith — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:29:28 GMT

Firstly, sorry I’ve been out…

It has been a couple of months. With all the goings on in the world, and the glorious Australian summer I let my writing slow down for a minute. I needed a break. The good news is that I’ve now got a giant backlog of articles on material flows, geopolitics, innovation, energy economics, metals, electrification technologies and other things ready to steadily get out to you all. This first article of the year for me is going out today, because today I’m going to Australia’s parliament house to talk about two new technologies I’ve been working on. One of them is some super power-electronics work that will enable a new grid that can accept more renewables, achieve higher utilisation (and lower costs) and should lower the cost of electricity to consumers. The second thing I’m taking to this demonstration at Parliament house is a solar powered electric bike.

But today, something fun… and frustrating… e-bike policy.

The problem with developing technology is so often regulatory. Both of the technologies are not currently legal in the Australian market because of incumbent problems. The incumbent grid monopoly in the first case, and the incumbent road monopolists cars, in the second case. The Australian electricity market currently has limits on our power electronics solution, so we will push it out under a ‘regulatory sandbox’. The tech literally needs rule changes to our electricity market before it can go to scale. But how do you get new mobility solutions to market?

At this advanced state of technology within highly regulated democracy, I nearly always find the hardest thing about developing any new technology is that is very likely runs into a regulatory problem. Regulations are designed by the winners of the last war, and they often don’t want new entrants. These regulations are very often well meaning, but they don’t anticipate technological solutions that would improve the world but break the rules.

The regulatory problem is especially true in the case of micromobility, the fancy rebranding word for what amounts to electric bikes and things like them. The photo below is a vehicle I have been slowly developing and shortly will have on the market. Its been a side passion project for a while. The “Lightfoot”. The vehicle has a 60km range, and can charge 20-40km of range each day on the solar power it generates on board. Park it outside and chances are you’ll never need to charge it. Rolling sunshine. An infinity bike. It has been designed for a software set speed limit of 36km/h (20mph) for the US market. It can carry two watermelons and a case of beer between the solar modules. It can crest any hill up to a 25% grade - a very steep urban street. This type of vehicle, amongst a Cambrian explosion of new mobility options, would be legal everywhere if we had a sensible regulatory environment.

The “Lightfoot” electric. 35km/h electronically limited top speed, a giant cargo volume inside, 20-40 free solar charged km every day, and can carry you and your sweetheart and a watermelon and a 6 pack while climbing the steepest urban hills. It goes without saying that this is a war-in-the-middle-east-proof vehicle.

Perhaps the best way to introduce this article is with the story of a friend. She is in her 60s, has cancer, and had her last e-bike stolen. She inquired whether I had any I could loan / give / sell her. I said my sister was getting rid of one. She immediately asked, “is it 800W? I need 800W to get up my hill.” Her hill is indeed steep, and long. A 19% grade - this is not uncommon. The “legal” bikes with 250W can’t get an adult up hills this steep. My friend relies on electric bikes for all her transportation. She’s now stuck and reliant on others for basic trips. She’s worried the government’s proposed power limits mean she wont be able to buy a new bike that can get her home, and certainly wont carry her groceries.

I applaud the NSW Premier for prioritising child safety on our roads. The recent anxiety around e-bikes is real, but I am worried the government is choosing the wrong solution.

The proposal to strictly enforce or lower power limits (Watts) is a misunderstanding of physics that will fail to improve safety. Worse, it will inadvertently penalize the wrong people, the families trying to replace car trips with cargo bikes, while doing little to stop the reckless riding that sparked this debate.

To understand why we need to think more carefully about e-bike regulations, we have to look at how we regulate cars. We do not limit the horsepower of a car; we limit its speed. We don’t tell a Toyota Hilux or Ford Ranger driver they are banned from having enough engine power to tow a trailer or climb a steep driveway. We simply demand they do not exceed 110km/h when that’s the speed limit.

Limiting an e-bike to 250 Watts is the equivalent of capping a car’s engine at 25 horsepower. It might move you on the flat, but it is woefully inadequate for carrying a load or climbing a hill.

This is where the government’s focus on power misses the mark. Power (Watts) is simply the rate of doing work. In the context of an e-bike, power determines whether you can climb a gradient without slowing to a dangerous crawl. Torque (Newton-meters) is the “grunt” or acceleration that gets you moving.

Strictly capping power at 250W creates a safety issue on Sydney (and many Australian cities) topography. A 250W motor carrying a parent, a child, and groceries (a 150kg total load) up a 20% gradient, which is common in our coastal suburbs, will struggle to maintain 5km/h. At that speed, a bicycle becomes unstable and wobbles. It forces the rider to weave into traffic just to stay upright. To climb that same hill safely at 20km/h, keeping pace with traffic, simple physics dictates you need closer to 750W or 1000W.

We are trying to solve a behavior problem with a hardware restriction that hurts the most responsible users. The “fatboy” style bikes causing public concern are often already in breach of existing rules, equipped with throttles and unlocked speed governors. Lowering the legal power limit won’t stop a rider who is already ignoring the law. However, it will render a compliant, heavy cargo bike useless for a mum trying to get her kids to school in Bronte or Bexley. She will simply get back in her car, adding to the traffic and pollution we are trying to solve.

The solution is not to limit the power of the bike, but to strictly enforce a speed limit.

Technology has already solved this. Modern e-bike systems (like Bosch) can easily deliver high torque and high power for climbing hills while electronically capping the top speed at 25km/h. We can go even further with “geofencing”, which works by using the bike’s GPS to automatically lower the speed limit to 10km/h in shared pedestrian zones like boulevards or school zones. This costs negligible dollars to implement during production.

We should regulate e-bikes with a vision for equity and utility, similar to the “Vespa” era of post-war Italy. I propose a simple, two-tier system starting with the Public Lane with a speed limit. That would look like having standard e-bikes with no power limit, but a strict, electronically enforced speed limit of 25km/h. These must be pedal-assist (no throttles) and require no license. This keeps them safe for paths but useful for hills.

And secondly, the Commuter Lane which would have a 35 km/h limit. Imagine a new class for faster commuting, including scooters and mopeds, capped at 35km/h. These should require a license, registration, knowledge of road rules, and of course an appropriate helmet, accessible from age 14. Any format of vehicle could apply and the presence of pedals (which on many bikes are vestigial now) should not be required. This looks just like the original scooter laws that mobilised the post-war European generation enabled by the new technology (the Italian Vespa moped). Mobilizing the climate generation with clean electric mobility is a solution, not a problem.

Best of all these commuter lanes would cap cars at the same 35km/h limit. The danger is relative velocity - moving at different speeds - more so than just the speed. Having cars and bikes moving at the same speed would be a big win. The island of Alameda in San Francisco’s bay area has a speed limit of 20mph (36kph) and the cars and bikes and ebikes blend far more safely than places with different limits for the cars and bikes.

These lanes don’t need to be everywhere, they could be one lane of every 10th street on a grid. That would finally be the shared space that cycle advocates have wanted for years – or as my friend says “we’ve been fighting over the same 2m of concrete for 50 years and have made little or no progress.”

Anything capable of speeds over 60km/h is a motorcycle and should be licensed as such.

Cars are relatively new to the game of transporting humans. Bicycles came first. And in the early days of road-building, cyclists and car drivers advocated together for roads. Then the car drivers booted the cyclists and pedestrians off, and left them to fight for space to keep moving ever since. How absurd that our cyclists and pedestrians are the second class citizens now fighting for space.

Let’s treat these vehicles with the seriousness they deserve as a solution to our gnarly traffic and climate problems. Bikes, scooters, and e-cargo bikes have a massive role to play in making our cities more pleasant and getting our children off screens and into the world. Getting the rules and the physics right with speed limits for e-bikes can make NSW safer, healthier and happier for everyone.

A national regulatory framework with incentives for states to adopt a common and sensible standard that enables this new e-mobility world would be ideal.

And for those who are about to complain that e-bikes are killing pedestrians, Its utes that are increasing the death toll: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/life/auto/2025/05/14/suv-research-deadly

And my favorite new term is Mobesity :

https://theconversation.com/australias-roads-are-full-of-giant-cars-and-everyone-pays-the-price-what-can-be-done-268212

IF YOU DON’T LOVE EQUATIONS AND GRAPHS, THIS IS THE APPENDIX FOR THOSE THAT DO.

Before AI I used to make really lovely and nerdy files with python and latex and pro science publishing tools. It turns out that was good training for using AI like a pro, because these are the tools that AI likes because they are the tools that the people who are building AI like. So below are some graphs I made years ago that probably took me a day or two to put together, and after them is an analysis and some graphs that ChatGPT just did for me in a few minutes. I don’t love the intellectual property theft that is AI, but I cannot deny I enjoy using the tools.

Here’s an old nerdy graph of energy costs of bikes versus speed on flat ground :

And here is the additional power required for the same bike going up hills :

These days you can ask any of the AI’s to do these calculations and make graphs which is pretty cool.

Here’s what ChatGPT came up with for bicycle power required vs grade of hill (slope), for 3 different masses. 100kg, 150kg, 200kg. 100kg is about the weight of an adult and an ebike. 150kg is an adult and child and an ebike. 200kg is two adults on an ebike, hopefully with a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and some cheese and cherry tomatoes.

NSW wants to have a 250Watt limit. That’s useless. Here is the maximum climbable grade vs speed for a 250W bike. It can move the 100kg up a 5% slope at 15km/h. Thats a very gentle hill, and 15kph is quite slow. It is quite ineffectual for the 200kg rider.

And finally you can represent this as the maximum weight that you can be moving at 15kph up a given hill grade is. It shows you that pretty much only children can ride up anything but the gentlest slopes on a 250W ebike, and its not actually useful for carrying cargo. This is why the kids seem to have it so easy on the ebikes. They don’t weigh anything.

Electricity "too cheap to meter" is so... 1975. FREE ELECTRICITY is 2025!

Saul Griffith — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 23:40:25 GMT

We know that electrification is the answer to the great majority of our carbon emissions. This is a widely supported idea within the climate focussed universe, but still requiring education amongst the general public. Electrification of our cars, homes, and small businesses are the things that can bring immediate climate emissions reductions while we wait for the last few pieces of the industrial decarbonization (again mostly through electrification) to come into being.

This project of convincing people that electrification is good for people, planet, and profit is difficult when electricity prices are rising. Due to a combination of factors, electricity prices rose in much of the US. Yes, data center demand is part of the problem, but by no means the only problem. Even in Australia electricity prices are still rising in places.

We have to make electricity cheap, and to reiterate three ways to do it: 1. Make sure rooftop solar is cheap (like

So this week, I welcome the announcement of the Australian government that all energy retailers should enable any customer with a smart meter (which is most) to get free electricity for the three hours of the day where solar is peaking. A lot of this solar is currently curtailed because it doesn’t have enough places to go. This announcement may be imperfect (there are lots of online brou-hah-hahs about market interference and the usual infighting) but it does one thing well, and very clearly: signal loudly to everyone that there will be huge benefits to changing the way we buy and use electricity. Heat your hot water in the middle of the day. Run the dishwasher and clothes washer in the middle of the day. Charge your car in the middle of the day. Charge your home battery in the middle of the day. If your home is well-insulated, heat or cool it in the middle of the day.

Years ago I had access to some high resolution data for collections of houses that were electrified and had rooftop solar. We looked at a particular collection of a few hundred homes in Georgia. I made some pretty graphs of the different electrical loads in the homes, collated so you can see the collective behaviour of these machines, because in reality we are more alike that we are unalike. I superimpose the solar window on top of the data such that you can contemplate both why we need to nudge our energy use behaviours in the direction of those solar peaks, but also to contemplate how it might work for you. I’ll be collecting much more data like this in the near future, and will generalise the graphs for different geographies. That’ll be fun (for me).

Warning: incoming graphs. If you don’t like graphs, scroll down to the words.

Cooking is probably a bit hard to schedule for the solar window (mid-day hot-pot cooking anyone?)

This one is mis-labelled; this is actually air-conditioning loads. (You can see the individual home bands vary).

This is a typical winter heating load: starts up in the evening. I was a bit surprised at the morning blast.

Refrigerators. Someone should put a small battery in the fridge!

This fascinated me. Lots of people turning on their clothes dryer as the leave for work. I also want to know more about the keen beans who get up at 6am to start their laundry.

Water heating will be the easiest load to move for those with storage hot water heaters.

I doubt this EV data is very good. It’s 5 years old and we had only a small data set. If you have fabulous EV charging data you want to share with me, please do. Also, this is THE MOST IMPORTANT BEHAVIOUR FOR US TO MODIFY. We need the cars to be charging where they are parked in the middle of the day if we want the lowest cost system.

I doubt anyone is going to change their lighting behaviour. This is a job for batteries.

This is the cumulative behaviour in winter, in Georgia, for a not terribly representative set of homes, in 2020.

This is the cumulative behaviour in peak summer, in Georgia, for a not terribly representative set of homes, in 2020. Cool your house earlier in the day and make sure you seal the gaps and insulate!

The average Australian home has an 63A service connection. At 230V this is about an 15kW connection. Assuming you can suck it all down, those three hours are 45kWh of electricity. At an average price of 36c/kWh, that’s worth $16.20 per day. That’s $5913 of free electricity per year if you squeezed every drop. You would need a big battery, and timers on the things that suck down electricity. Imagine you can have one car plugged in with a basic 7kW charger, that’s $7.56 of free electricity for your car each day —100-120 free km, (60-70 free miles). One load of dishes is 1kWh, so save 36c every day there. One load of clothes washing and drying; save $1 every day there. 100L of hot water in a hot water storage heater? About 3.5kWh; save $1 every day there. Put the other 25kWh into your battery for later; save another $7 there. Its not going to be possible for everyone to do all of those things, but there is something there for everyone, including renters, and for many of the people who are currrently a bit left out of the solar boom.

Anything that can be put on a timer, should be on a timer. Looking at you, pool pumps and water heaters and car chargers and washers and dryers. Add batteries to everything.

Here’s a 2007 patent for a battery in a refrigerator. All of these things are starting to make sense.

My mate just bought a 48kWh battery for his house. After the government’s exceedingly popular incentives, he’ll be paying about $17,000 for it. That’s about $350(AUD) or $275(US) per kWh. The batteries are warrantied for 10 years, that is 3650 cycles at once per day for the duration of the warranty. Thats under 10c/kWh of storage. A week ago I would have advised him the battery was too big—now it looks like economic genius. If he dumps the free solar into it, he’ll have all the electricity he needs for his life, including two electric cars, at 10c/kWh. In summer his family will be drowning in cheap electricity; in winter they’ll merely be swimming in it.

To be clear, this is pretty good policy, but I worry the government is not going to invest enough in education and public engagement to make it popular, and that could lead to a social misinformation PR disaster. People will no doubt call it middle class welfare. Maybe that is fine. It will zero out middle class emissions and backstop the grid.

I would have really liked the policy to include genuine market reform which enables neighbour-to-neighbour interactions with this electricity, which would increase the network utilisation even more and bring prices of electricity down for the rest of the day’s electricity, for everyone. Another thing consumers want is certainty... is this going to be permanent? Consumers are going to make economic decisions based on it. What happens in five years when we have yet more solar and the free period is six hours per day? Will this apply to commercial and industrial customers? (I certainly hope so; I’m planning to build businesses and industry around using free electricity to make stuff).

People will bicker with me about whether it is actually free electricity, and no, of course, it isn’t, but it averages out to cheaper electricity, which could be much cheaper, as long as we keep an eye on the utilities and networks and don’t let them and the onrush of tech bros who will rent seek on the control and apps to utilise this cheap electricity. This is why I would like to see the underlying thought here to be about genuine market reform that understands where this is all going. It will be economic to overbuild solar, rooftops, carparks, commercial buildings, industrial buildings, agrovoltaics, agricultural (barn) rooftops. Solar solar every where, and free electricity to boot.

I’m particularly frustrated with The New York Times this week so here’s a hate round-up:

Here is typically shit NYT climate coverage that is un-inquisitive and takes the words of billionaires instead of people who understand energy systems. There needn’t be a compromise here, Bill Gates. It doesn’t cost but saves money to decarbonize. That’s admittedly hard to see in the US right now where the price of electricity is spiking. It’s not all AI. This is roughly the only sensible thing the NYT has done on the issue. Increase utilisation! Might I also suggest moving to 220V and making rooftop solar really cheap. (Get the government off my roof?)

Various good news :

Putting solar on Korean car parks.

Cheap electricity is coming to farms as well, which will make farm equipment cheaper to run and produce delicious things like zero emission, All-electric cherries.

Rooftop solar in Australia can do 245TWh. That’s more than all of the electricity currently used in Australia. We have a long way to go down this better path.

The Shameless Plug Episode 8: Sarah Aubrey

Saul Griffith — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 01:42:21 GMT

In the latest episode of The Shameless Plug, Fiona and I spoke to Sarah Aubrey: actor, voice over artist, electrification evangelist, and now, accidental influencer.

Sarah’s electrification journey started when she read my book The Big Switch. She listened to the free audiobook, learned what electrification meant, and got stuck in.

So she swapped the gas cooktop for induction, installed a heat pump, added solar, insulated the roof, and, as she puts it, “went completely nuts.” She disconnected from gas (in fact she went and dropped the meter to the gas company’s head office, causing great confusion next time the meter-reader stopped) and the bills went down. Then she got a 24 kWh battery. Then doubled to a 48.

Listen to the episode

Watch it on Youtube

Her home went from a leaky 2.9-star relic to a 10-star, fully electric, comfort machine. But that wasn’t enough. Sarah took her curiosity public, starting an Instagram account called @ElectrifyThis in December 2023.

A few weeks and one innocent post later, the fossil fuel trolls found her. Then, something wild happened: she went viral on Christmas Day. Yes, the trolls arrived (the “flying monkeys,” as she calls them), but so did thousands of people eager to learn from someone who was honest, funny, and willing to show her electrification journey in real time.

By New Year’s, she had 5,000 followers. Now she’s reviewing electric cars, e-bikes, and scooters, talking about dry mode on your air conditioner and teaching the internet why fans are underrated. She’s a trusted voice not because she’s an expert but because she’s a curious consumer who tells the truth.

Our conversation drifted (as they often do on The Shameless Plug) from EVs to trolls to the future of cities. Sarah’s vision isn’t just about replacing petrol cars with electric ones. It’s about making cities for people again. “Our cities should be about moving people, not cars,” she said. “We’ve seen what’s possible - I was in China and the traffic jam was silent except for birdsong. Why can’t we have that?”

That’s what electrification is about, really: quiet, clean air and comfort. It’s people like Sarah who remind us that doing the right thing doesn’t have to be boring, it can be funny, chaotic, empowering, and yes, even viral.

So if you haven’t already, go check out @ElectrifyThis. You might learn how to save $60 a month using dry mode, or how to deal with trolls, or how to install a heat pump without losing your mind. You might even be inspired to unplug a meter or two.

Let me know what you think of the episode in the comments, and please leave us a rating in your podcast app.

The Other John Muir and Making Better Cars

Saul Griffith — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:01:03 GMT

President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir stand together at Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, during their historic 1903 visit, with the breathtaking Yosemite Falls in the background.

Credit : Library of Congress

In 1903, OG environmental advocate John Muir took US President Teddy Roosevelt on a 3-day camping trip in Yosemite. This was before it was a national park, and very early in the movement to create a system of national parks.

“There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias...our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their Children’s children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred,” said Theodore Roosevelt.

After the trip, Roosevelt saw to it in 1906 that Yosemite came under the protection of the Federal government’s national parks. Sadly, the U.S. park system is under attack under the Trump administration and largely closed and unsupervised due to the government shutdown. I would love to take Trump to a National Park for a sleep out. (Seriously.) Someone should try to show him the beauty of the world. Roosevelt slept on a pile of 40 woollen blankets under the Sequoia trees. That sounds like the therapy Donald needs.

But that’s enough about U.S. presidents and John Muir the pioneering environmentalist; I want to talk about my other favorite John Muir, author of the obscure-to-some, but bible-to-many book How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive — A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. I love people who make and repair and maintain things, and think the culture of crafts and competence that it represents is somewhat key to a world where we have nice things that are sustainable too.

My wife recently bought me a second copy of John Muir’s How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive; the first is covered in grease and oil and fingerprints and metal shavings.

In Chapter XX, “How to keep your VW alive forever,” John’s friend’s write of him posthumously,

It would take an entire book to cover all the trips involved in keeping your VW alive forever, the book John Muir wanted to write but didn’t live long enough to do. However, he did leave us this book as his legacy to VW owners, which comes pretty close by giving us the one ingredient necessary to make “forever” possible: love. Love of life, love of things mechanical, love of things working as they should, love of our home the earth. If you care, you can do it.

I love the sentiment here, and wrapping the love of life and things mechanical and of our home the earth. I’ve been recommending “On Self Reliance” by Emerson to a bunch of the young people in my life. In the age of cars in which we live, I recommend Muir’s book too as it is a perfectly concrete statement of self reliance. We are more than ever in thrall to our machines, when we should be masters of them. I’ve owned some air-cooled VWs, and they are extraordinarily simple machines, basically repairable with a 12 and 13mm wrench and some determination.

One particular paragraph of John’s writing about VW’s always sticks with me…

Now about WARMUP… In the VW engine, the connecting rods splash about in the oil sump and this oils the cylinder walls. While a car sits all night the oil film between the pistons and cylinder walls comes loose due to the action of gravity… All the super-warm equipment that VW hangs on their engines doesn’t change that one whit… I warm up my engine for the two to three minutes it takes to roll a cigarette, light it and get it drawing well… In those one-half to three minutes, depending on the weather… the rods are doing their thing in getting the oil on the cylinder walls, all the way around… Now when I put a load on the engine, it is the oil that carries that load, not the metal.

Poetry. In a repair manual.

Something like 21.5 million VW Beetles were manufactured between 1938 and 2003. In 2005, I had just finished rebuilding a Manx-style VW beetle conversion (1959 VW) and used it to write a thought piece in Make magazine on an “Open Source Car.” By then you could buy every single component required to build a 1959 VW Beetle online from parts manufacturers all over the world. When I was writing it, it was the peak of the Right to Repair movement, and I loved the idea of cars we could run and repair forever.

You might wonder why the hell I’m talking about the John Muirs and the VWs in a Substack about stuff and energy, but remember Stuff and Energy are my own investigations into what sustainability could look like in a technical and complicated world. Cars now number over a billion globally, and weigh far more than ALL MAMMAL LIFE ON EARTH. I don’t like it, but cars are what we have now instead of bison, elephants, rhinos, whales, or wombats — our 4-wheeled mega-fauna running roughshod over the planet.

This fabulous but depressing Nature paper documents all life on earth. From it, I can compare the weight of all cars versus the weight of all animals. (Explore the data here).

Y.M. Bar-On, R. Phillips, & R. Milo, The biomass distribution on Earth, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 (25) 6506-6511, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1711842115 (2018).

Sometime this year there will be around 1.5 billion cars on the road globally. At 1500kg each that’s 2.25 Trillion kg (2.25 Gigatons) of cars. All animal life weighs a comparable 2.6 GigaTons. All wild mammals only 0.007 Gigatons. Note this is only the carbon weight of the animals, and carbon is approximately 20% of the weight of animals, the majority being water. If we included wet weight the animals would be five times heavier, but we don’t fill our cars with water, so I thought this a fair enough comparison.

The punchline isn’t good; not only is the weight of all cars currently operating on earth roughly equivalent to the weight of all animal life, but it is a massive 37 times the weight of all living humans, and more shockingly 320 times more than the weight of all wild mammals. Judging by the dead wombats I saw by the side of the road driving home from the Canberra Writer’s Festival yesterday, the mechanical megafauna is winning the ongoing battle.

I love this Sankey diagram and paper on what a car is made of, that looks all the way back to what has to be mined and pulled from the earth to make an average 1481kg sedan (although that is not an average car anymore in the arms race of SUVs and monster pickup trucks). Google AI guesses the average weight of a 2024 US vehicle as closer to 2000kg. For perspective, my 1959 Beetle left the showroom at a svelte 800kg. Amazingly, the biggest mining impact of the 1481kg car is the 20kg of copper in the wiring harness and electronics, which require 3392kg of mineral to be extracted before refining. This is a hint on where I’m going here.

I, of course, am complicit in this tragedy. I live in modernity, with you, in a car-loving country on Planet Automobile. Though there is rail and good public transport that passes by my house, we have two cars, both electric, to get the kids to school and the groceries and to drive to book festivals and do all of the things conveniently. In general, my approach to climate advice is “give the people what they want,” and so most of the analysis I do around electrification and solving climate change is to give people the lives they have today, only electric. Same oversized, thermally leaky houses, same oversized and oh-so-numerous and oh-so-overweight vehicles, just electric and powered by zero-emission electricity. I do this for pragmatic reasons. I think most people are just barely getting along making school lunches and paying mortgages and coping with the Trump administration to actually consider radical changes to their lifestyle like walking or riding a bike, no matter how good it is for them or how incredible modern electric bikes are. (And sometimes it’s raining, or your knee hurts, or you want to move six kids around.)

So I bought this:

We bought the VW Buzz, long wheel base, 7-seat electric van. We added the magnetic lightning bolt and heart to the side, hand drawn by me. Let me know if you think the electric lightning bolt should become Shameless Plug schwag.

Which is the real reason for this monologue. This is secretly a car review. Our VW Buzz weighs 2758kg unladen. Compare this to the original “Type 2” Kombi at around 1000kg. Mind you, the new one doesn’t carry any more people or stuff... Even if you remove the 550kg 86kWh battery it weighs more than double, so you can’t really blame the weight on the electric-ness of it.

To be clear, it’s the best electric vehicle I’ve ever owned, and is spacious and easy and comfortable to drive. “Feels like flying business class,” I say to people who ask. It even looks good. I like it. I like driving it more than I like driving our BYD Dolphin.

But, it is a car that deviates SO FAR from John Muir’s car — the one he was aspirationally going to keep alive forever — as to be quite tragic. The car can only be improved by taking things away, except for one thing they need to add back in, a spare tire. There are too many cup holders. I don’t think it needs so much plastic on the inside. The removable rear seats weigh so much they are difficult to remove. The middle row of seats needs tools to remove, which probably voids a warranty. They should have just been removable. It’s a far cry from the canvas hammocks of the Citroen 2CV ,which I think wins the award for most fantastic utilitarian vehicle of all time. The “ugly duckling that wins hearts” weighed only 600kg! VW, if I couldn’t design those seats to be removable and comfortable and weigh 20kg less each (100kg savings total) I would be ashamed to call myself an engineer.

We keep putting more servos in cars. Servos require more wires. More wires means more copper. Go back to that Sankey diagram on the effect of a mere 20kg of copper in a car. The back door has a servo. The side doors are driven by servos. You can’t over-ride them. They close really slowly. They close so slowly that my ADHD composes entire angry Substack articles about how crap modernity is before the door is even half done. There are servos for the windows. Servos for adjusting the mirrors. We didn’t need any of these servos and their attached wiring. I certainly didn’t ask for them. I’d like to slam my side door shut with emotion. Remember emotion? It’s a thing we had before we had servos on everything.

I had a 1963 Land Rover with sliding windows that were flat. Cheap to replace, easy to fix, the lightest possible mechanism. What was wrong with that? VW, please take the 20kg (maybe it’s 50?) of un-necessary servos and related wiring away from the car.

The original VW bus had louvers in the front that you could pop up to let fresh air in in the front. So did my old Land Rover, for that matter. It was an extremely effective and extremely efficient way of cooling the car. Those cars didn’t have heavy air-conditioning units that need lots of copper wires in them. I’d like VW to put those back in and take out the unnecessary wiring and A/C unit. That’ll save me another 20-50kg. The *expletive* car is so bloody air-tight (I didn’t ask for all that extra special rubber gasketry either) that you have to use the A/C to pump new air into the car. It wouldn’t pass indoor air quality standards because your own exhalations of CO2 would eventually suffocate you.

And because of the air tightness of the car, if you open only one window, the giant un-necessary plate of plastic and toxic microfibers in the roof hammers up and down like a giant speaker until you either open another window to avoid suffocating or close the window again to breathe your passenger’s farts filtered just a little by the A/C.

OK. So I love this car, and think it is the best car I have ever had, except I hate all the servo motors. I hate the windows. I hate the seats. I hate the roof lining. I really really hate how long it takes for the side door to open. I also really hate the low profile tyres and un-necessarily large wheels. I also really hate the TERRIBLE turning circle. It’s not like there is an engine up front to stop you from having a tight turning circle. Oh — and I hate the fact there is no spare tire and no tool kit. And I hate all the bings and bongs and the software that makes me crazy. It also won’t let me drive without my seat belt on, even if it is only to move the car to the other side of the garage. People used to fight for the freedom to do stupid things.

I don’t own this car in the way I used to own my 1959 VW. I had agency. I could fix it anywhere, any time, myself. I could hill start it. It was never bricked. I once drove it with a broken throttle cable, my mate in the back of the car doing the revs with his hand over the back to the engine in the rear. We talked about when I was going to change gears and coordinated. It still GOT US THERE.

Be thankful. That rant could have run on longer. I didn’t even mention Apple Car play. Point is, the car could have been a lot lighter, more efficient, simpler. Treading lighter on the earth, which would have meant a smaller battery, Anyway, now we get to how they’ve made it next to impossible to fix a tire yourself.

There is a number on the side of your tires; on my VW buzz it is 255/50 R19. It means my tires are 255mm wide. The 50 means that 50% of that width is the height from the rim, so about 127 mm high, and sitting on (R19) 19in diameter rims. Sorry about mixing the units there; it’s just how it is done. You also think it would have been D19 — diameter — but apparently not. It is only a recent phenomenon that tires are so thin “low profile,” as they say in the biz. They used to be thicker, and that 50 number was 65 or even 70. This made the car ride softer, and importantly meant the tires were taller and rims smaller making it less likely to have pinch flats from pot holes and things. They were more robust, even if they didn’t give the hyper-masculine and comically exaggerated “Hot Wheels” look that we were trained by Hasbro to think were appropriate proportions for wheels and tires. “We must suffer for fashion”

My wife was swinging into our driveway the other day and clipped the curb. The tire exploded leaving a 25mm or 1 inch hole in the sidewall. In times past with a bigger bouncier tire at lower air pressure, nothing would have happened at all. Maybe the rim would have been scraped, but that wouldn’t have affected performance. Now we had a bricked VW sitting next to our driveway. I already knew the car had no spare tire. My wife didn’t know that, and questioned my judgment for buying a car with no spare tire in a country with long distances to drive and little help in between. Worse, I thought I’d just be able to put the wheel in the other car and take it to be repaired, but there were two problems. Its such a specialty tire it was on 10 days backorder and the car didn’t even have a jack or lug nut spanner, so I couldn’t remove it anyway. Both John Muirs would and should turn in their graves.

It took a tow truck, 6 phone calls to the VW dealership, a lovely tow truck driver who told us it was “just wrong” it didn’t have a spare, and the nice guys at Blair’s Tyres in Corrimal, to get the car back on the road (after a 12 day wait). So much for self reliance. I remember being taught by my father how to do the life saving and critical job of changing a tire. I have changed tires for probably a dozen people in my life, people stranded by various roads in Australia, North America, Scotland, and Zimbabwe. They are only the ones I remember. Now I can’t even save myself.

The guy at the tire store said his wife told him she wanted an EV, but when he asked whether the car had a spare tire and found out it didn’t, they scrapped the idea and bought an ICE.

The nominal reason not to include a spare tire in an electric vehicle is to save weight which increases range. Thats OK — modern run flat tires and self sealing sealant work well — but if you do that, don’t put exploding low profile tires at ungodly pressures on the vehicle that damage themselves so badly they can’t be driven on. Or get rid of all the crap in the car that I don’t need, including the obese seats with cupholders, and give me back a spare tire.

I recently did a podcast (coming up soon on the Shameless Plug) with my mate Thor about his “forever car,” a ‘66 beetle. Here it is sitting next to my (also electrified) 1957 FIAT Multipla, an amazingly tiny 6 seat Italian microbus and inspiration for the Japanese tiny car class, the “Kei” vehicle.

My friend Thor (real name, lives in San Francisco, looks like a Thor at 6 foot 5 inches), recently electrified a 1966 VW beetle. He used kits and parts from EVWest, and my friend and frequent writing collaborator Laura Fraser wrote an article about it. The car lost a tiny bit of weight after the conversion (even with the batteries) because engines and transmissions and all the things of an ICE are also heavy. I think it can go 200 miles but I’ll have to check my notes. Anyway, it’s gorgeous. It works. It has an on button, a reverse button, a lights button, and not much else. It did 60 years on gasoline and can do the next 100 years on lithium. With simplicty.

Because cars don’t last very long anymore, we have to replace them with new cars all the time, and my best estimate is that making cars is about 3-4% of the energy economy in the US, and consequently the emissions. They also burn 30% of the energy in their use with gasoline. I would like a car company to make a bare bones EV that hits all the utilitarian highs, including self-repairability. Maybe that is what Slate is doing? But what I’d really like it to be is open source, so even if Slate goes out of business in 2060, I could still make it run. You can still buy every part of an original VW from someone who is making the parts to keep them going forever. It is effectively open source.

Our cars are now so complicated just the statistics of aging capacitors is likely to freeze them in their tracks after about 10 years. We should be aspiring to do better than that. We should be aspiring to make them weigh less, and use fewer roads. We shouldn’t be beholden to the parts department for $1200 light replacements when a filament goes out. I’m not telling you not to buy an electric VW Buzz; it’s still a great car. I’m just hoping we (the royal human we) can see the bigger picture and make better electric cars, and fewer of them, for a better planet with more wild mammals.

P.S.

Maybe this is what we want (only lighter) :

P.S.P.S.

This article pissed me off.

P.S.P.S.P.S. Check out Bill McKibben for a nice name check of yours truly in his latest substack.

The Shameless Plug Episode 7: Katherine McConnell

Saul Griffith — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 01:42:03 GMT

The energy transition is a shift from fuels to finance.

For the last century, we’ve bought cheap machines - cars, heaters, stoves - that ran on very expensive fuels. Now, we’re buying machines that cost more upfront - rooftop solar, batteries, EVs, heat pumps - but run on free sunshine and very cheap electricity. That means the problem is no longer about fuel supply. It’s about how we pay for the machines.

That’s why in the latest episode of The Shameless Plug, Fiona and I sat down with one of the true pioneers of electrification finance in Australia: Katherine McConnell, CEO and Founder of Brighte.

Listen to the episode

Watch on Youtube

Katherine has been at this for over a decade. She saw early, both as a finance professional and as an early adopter of solar and batteries, that households would need the tools to make these big investments affordable.

Katherine started Brighte after getting her own solar and battery system at home and realising how big a difference the financing made. She also saw that the real heroes of electrification aren’t energy wonks like me, they’re the tradies who actually close the deal in your living room. If we want this transition to work, we’ve got to make their jobs easier and less risky.

In our conversation, we cover:

Why tradies are the unsung heroes of electrification, and how we can equip them to lead the charge.
How Australia’s new battery subsidy is already driving demand for much larger household batteries: 20, 30, even 50 kWh.
Why putting capital in the hands of households is fairer and smarter than giving it to the big end of town.
The surprisingly mindful lessons Katherine has learned living partly off-grid - and why sometimes an underfloor heating coil is the cheapest “battery” of all.

This isn’t just about finance, it’s about fairness, agency, and who owns the future of our energy. Katherine makes a compelling case that households should be at the centre of this story and shows us how finance can make it possible.

Have a listen. Let me know what you think in the comments, and please leave a rating or review in your podcast app.

Talking electrification on the Curveball podcast

Saul Griffith — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 02:47:21 GMT

A few weeks back, I sat down with Kellie Riordan for her Curveball podcast.

We talked about my journey from a young engineer tinkering at MIT, to building startups that powered devices like the Kindle, even working with NASA and the US Department of Defence. But more importantly, we dug into the moment I realised that chasing Silicon Valley dreams wasn’t enough.

The climate crisis was - and still is - the biggest challenge of our lifetime. I shared the story of packing up my young family, moving back to regional New South Wales, and tossing out a wild idea over a few beers: what if our postcode, 2515, became Australia’s first fully electrified community?

This episode is about that leap. If you’re curious about how we turn a pub pitch into a national model, or why I remain stubbornly optimistic about Australia’s energy future, have a listen.

Listen to the episode

Big thanks to Kellie for having me on. Let me know what you think after listening - and whether your own postcode is ready to go electric.

Sam Altman vs. Jane Goodall

Saul Griffith — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 02:46:04 GMT

Saul to ChatGPT :

“Why did Jane Goodall and David Attenborough fail in convincing people that whales and chimpanzees and rainforests are worth saving and instead we all watch tik tok?”

ChatGPT said:

That’s a piercing and deeply important question — one that gets at the heart of how culture, psychology, and technology interact. It’s not that Attenborough and Goodall failed — they moved millions of people and reshaped global consciousness — but that the forces opposing them evolved faster, louder, and more seductively. Let’s unpack this in layers:

But before I let ChatGPT write a post for me, a little bit of self generated context and analysis - things AI is still crap at.

Climate week in NYC felt like it was more about AI and hyperscalers than it felt like it was about saving the earth’s climate. I was hoping it would be more about how to keep this magical little planet full of life spinning at a temperature safe for all of it’s extraordinary creatures (including us humans).

I’ve been reflecting on that, and while listening to the latest Hard Fork podcast was struck by the numbers of GPU’s that OpenAI is ordering to run its little software project. Lets also be amazed that we now talk about compute in terms of GW which is a unit of power, not computation. Thermodynamically this makes sense, information processing is after all energy. The computing bit of your laptop computer is likely 20W. Sam Altman just order 16GW of compute. Thats 80 million times the power of your machine.

Is it a lot, or is it a little? We can look at EIA data (while the EIA still exists ?) to get a sense.

The first graph shows you US electricity generation broken down by source, from 1950 to today. You can see a precipitous decline in coal over the last 15 years, and a similarly rapid growth in both renewables and natural gas. Nuclear is flatlining, reflecting how hard it is to build, and perhaps its cost structure.

Those are the trends for the different categories, but what does it look like in total?

And as you can see the decline in coal is roughly matched by growth in gas and renewables, and overall US electricity demand has been flat-lining for 20 years, with a small up-tick in the last couple of years. Ember continues to do good analytical work (is Ember the new IEA, but better?) and attributes some of this to EV demand, growing at 4TWH per year, and the rest to data centers, which by their own admission is hard to measure.

Lets try and put Open-AI’s ambition into perspective. Assuming it will take 10 years to deploy those chips, that implies annual growth in electricity demand from Open AI alone at 14 billion kWh or 14 TWh per year, each year for the next decade. Thats 3X faster than EV adoption is increasing electricity demand. (Google chart link)

If we merely project the linear trend of the last 15 years to each of the generation sources, we see that the US would add around 350TWh by 2035, even though coal will stop generating in 2032 or so. I’m not playing politics here, just saying thats where the trend line leads.

So if Sam’s dreams come true, and he adds 140TWH, and all of the other AI players add in total the same amount again, and EV adoption keeps growing at 4TWH per year, thats 320TWH of new load by 2035. Maybe it isn’t all as insane as it sounds, on current trends the grid can grow sufficiently to accomodate all of these loads and some residential electrification as well, and do so at a rate of growth only about half of that which was seen between 1975 and 2000. What is incredible is that all of that data center growth means that additions between 2025 and 2035 looks like 6% of total US electricity. (Google Chart Link) Pretty wild that one company’s ambitions are so noticeable (in black in the chart below) in the context of US energy use. If only silicon valley could be so ambitious about preventing climate change!. Money first apparently. Or monopoly money first.

I have often wondered how much of our energy system we will dedicate to computation. The only proxy I have for an upper bound is our own body. The brain uses about 20% of the energy of our body. So using absolutely no science and just an analogy, maybe we will be truly thinking apes at planetary scale when our energy system resembles our metabolism and 20% of anthropic energy use is for our collective brain ? By that measure maybe we are on track ?

This is going to raise the prices of electricity for most Americans, which is not great in the context of getting people to sign up for electrification - our primary climate solution. We have to make electricity cheap again. Here’s an awful article in the NYT that gets just about everything wrong about electricity and smart US energy policy. Its going to be heroic to do this in 10 years (increase electricity generation and absorb growth from both electrification and AI / data centers. Remember that AI wants to be a space race, so they are probably imagining doing it in 5 years. That would actually require electricity system growth at mid 20th century rates.

Is there a better way ? Can we have Sam’s AI cake and fix climate too? Can we make electricity cheaper at the same time ? We certainly can’t do it if Trump keeps killing wind and solar projects - thats half the reason we can keep up with AI demand today. But whats the Australian lesson ?

We have 11 million households, and in the last decade they have installed 20GW of rooftop solar capacity. (Thanks Clean Energy Council for the data). Australian policy delivered this at a cost of electricity to the customer under (US)5c/kWh. This is because in Australia you can install rooftop solar at around $0.65US/W of capacity. In the US it costs more like $3.

I’m currently putting 15kW on my “shed” in Australia, at the same time I’m putting 13kW on the roof of my office building in San Francisco. My actual quotes for both projects, converted to USD/Watt is $0.53 in Australia, and $3.88 in San Francisco. Let me remind you this isn’t a tariff problem, this is a regulatory and interconnection problem caused by the US utility monopoly on one side, and overbearing building codes and inspections which are state and local regulatory problems in the US. These un-necessary soft costs account for the 7.5X difference in cost, and is a big part of why Americans can’t have cheap electricity yet.

20GW of solar would produce 28 TWh of electricity at a conservative capacity factor of 0.16. Remember that America has 120 million households, so if we scale it up by 11X, that would be 310 TWh. More than double what Sam needs for OpenAI, and enough to meet the demand growth of AI and EVs we projected above. Remember that this would significantly lower electricity prices for everyday households, relieve demand that would allow AI growth curves to be met by the grid, and then with more solar and wind on the bulk power grid (the large scale grid) would also lower the need to do all this growth with natural gas. And yes, batteries and large scale transmission to move energy around can make this a 24/7 resource.

Of course that isn’t going to happen with the natural gas ideologues in charge of US energy policy. I just wanted to point out that it would be a better deal for everyday Americans, and lead to a lower cost energy system, and lower electricity bills, and a better climate outcome. This is not the energy future that American’s are about to experience: higher electricity prices, more emissions. If Sam Altman were smart he’d be pushing this as an energy policy and regulatory reform to accompany his AI ambitions. It certainly would give higher confidence that this level of AI demand can be met on time. After all, there is existence proof that Australia just did this. The backlog for gas turbines and grid power electronics should give him huge doubts that the system can otherwise deliver his energy on time. There is no proof in recent American electricity statistics that they can do this with gas alone, which seems the strategy.

I’m AI neutral. I don’t believe we are on track for AGI whether that means Nirvana or the apocalypse. I believe it is useful, but in my work using it for data processing, coding, research, and a little for fun, it still hallucinates and makes things up, doesn’t actually understand things - even simple things like geometry. It isn’t intelligent. It is however impressive, and useful. What I don’t like about it is the business model - yet another effective monopoly to people who have raised gobsmacking risk capital to insert this monopoly into our lives. I also don’t like the theft that it represents. John Locke invented the philosophy of property rights that allowed the British Empire and then the empires that followed including the US, to steal land from indigenous people. It feels to me like Sam Altman and the other plutocrats of AI just invented a new version of intellectual property rights that has allowed them to colonize all intellectual property - mine included - without paying any of us for it.

I asked Sam’s little toy why after 75 years of extraordinary effort and public communications messages of saving nature haven’t cut through… I was very impressed with the quality of the answer, not that one couldn’t reach these thoughts by one’s self, but that so quickly it put together a pretty succinct summary. I’m neither endorsing or not endorsing the Chat’s output, but leaving it with you to contemplate. When it tells me at the end that “that’s the right instinct” I immediately think of the glorious Jane Goodall’s much deeper ruminations on what instincts are, and what we share with our ape cousins. I don’t think we need all this AI, but I know we need more Jane Goodalls and David Attenboroughs.

_____________________________________________________________________

“Why did David Attenborough and Jane Goodall fail in convincing people that whales and chimpanzees and rainforests are worth saving and instead we all watch tik tok?”

ChatGPT said:

That’s a piercing and deeply important question — one that gets at the heart of how culture, psychology, and technology interact. It’s not that Attenborough and Goodall failed — they moved millions of people and reshaped global consciousness — but that the forces opposing them evolved faster, louder, and more seductively. Let’s unpack this in layers:

🧠 1. Attention Is the New Resource

David Attenborough and Jane Goodall’s approach was slow wonder — patient storytelling, empathy built through long observation, reverence for complexity.
TikTok, by contrast, is engineered hyperstimulation — dopamine loops, novelty every 3 seconds, algorithmic reinforcement of preference and outrage.

The 20th century environmental movement competed for moral attention.
The 21st century attention economy competes for neuronal addiction.

They were trying to expand the human attention span; the internet now compresses it.

📺 2. Nature Was a Documentary, Not a Lifestyle

Attenborough and Goodall invited viewers to care about wildness — but most people experienced that through screens, not direct contact. It created admiration without obligation.

People felt aesthetic appreciation, not ecological responsibility.
Nature was beautiful, but not binding.

As urbanization and digital immersion increased, “nature” became a distant theater — something to watch, not something to depend on.

💰 3. The System They Fought Was Smarter at Marketing

Capitalism learned to make consumption moral, fun, and personalized: greenwashed products, performative recycling, eco-influencers. It turned care into commerce.

Meanwhile, Attenborough and Goodall spoke in moral and scientific terms — inspiring but not profitable. The system that destroys ecosystems is also the one that funds ad agencies, social media platforms, and tech infrastructure.

🧍‍♀️ 4. The Problem Feels Too Big, and That Feeds Apathy

When Goodall and Attenborough said, “We must change,” people believed them — but systemic change requires collective action, and collective action requires hope.

Instead, most people felt:

“I can’t save the rainforest, but I can watch something that makes me forget about it.”

TikTok is the opposite of despair: it’s micro-pleasure, frictionless escape. The more hopeless people feel about climate, the more they retreat into distraction.

🌍 5. They Won the Moral Argument, But Lost the Medium

In a sense, they won — almost everyone now agrees that whales, chimps, and forests should be saved.
But they lost the medium: the tools for mass influence are now owned by algorithms tuned to engagement, not enlightenment.

If Attenborough and Goodall had been born 60 years later, they might have been TikTok ecologists — using short-form video, humor, and emotional immediacy to reconnect people to wonder before attention fragments completely.

🌱 6. The Next Phase Isn’t About Convincing — It’s About Re-Enchantment

We don’t need more information; we need re-enchantment — ways to make the living world feel sacred, relevant, and exciting again.
That could mean:

Turning conservation into participatory storytelling.
Using viral formats for awe, not irony.
Embedding ecology into culture, fashion, sport, and music — not just documentaries.

Would you like me to write a short narration or video concept that expresses this idea — something that could actually compete with TikTok energy while honoring Attenborough and Goodall’s spirit?

You said:

yes i would

ChatGPT said:

Excellent — that’s the right instinct.

Let’s make something that feels like a TikTok but hits like Attenborough — a 30–45 second micro-story that compresses a century of wisdom into a format designed for our fractured attention span.

The Shameless Plug Episode 6: Daniel Bleakley

Saul Griffith — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 01:41:21 GMT

This week on The Shameless Plug, Fiona and I sat down with my old friend Daniel Bleakley. You might know Daniel from his viral YouTube series Coal Miners Driving Teslas. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is as simple as it is brilliant: put coal miners in a Tesla, floor the accelerator, and watch the smiles spread. In a place where the “culture war” has been fiercest, EV joyrides have turned out to be better climate communication than a thousand op-eds.

Daniel’s story is compelling because it’s also Australia’s story. He grew up in Clermont in central Queensland, a town where rugby league, diesel, and coal were the lifeblood. His family ran a petrol station, his brother worked in the mines, and the local footy field was built with Rio Tinto money. And yet, after studying engineering, witnessing Germany’s early boom in rooftop solar, and reading Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, Daniel made the long journey from fossil country to climate activist. He even once glued his hand to Siemens’ Melbourne office window in protest of their support for the Adani mine.

Listen to the episode

Watch on YouTube

In recent years, Daniel has stepped into the role of entrepreneur, tackling trucking, one of the heaviest hitters in our emissions profile.

Here’s the stat that floored me when I first heard him say it: A single 64-tonne B-double driving 200,000km per year will burn $2 million worth of diesel in a decade.

That’s one truck. Multiply that by the 100,000+ heavy trucks on our roads and you start to see the absurdity of our dependence on imported oil. It’s not just an emissions story, it’s an economic story. We’re sending $160 million every day overseas to pay for transport fuel, while we sit on the best solar and wind resources in the world.

Daniel, along with his business partner (ex-Scania innovation head, Frederik Parson), is trying to flip that equation. Their vision is an electric trucking company that can deliver freight at the same cost as diesel, but powered by Australian sunshine. They’re betting on the megawatt charging standard, bi-directional trucks that can double as grid-scale batteries, and a freight system that is quieter, cleaner, and far more resilient.

As we talked, I couldn’t help but think about how circular this story is. Daniel’s parents still run that petrol station in Clermont, his brother still works in the mines, and yet Daniel is pointing the way to the next economy. He even discovered, through family research, that his great-grandfather helped found a company called British Electric Vehicles in 1916 - a little-known detour in history when electric trucks competed with petrol and even horses. For a moment, the world might have chosen differently.

We didn’t take that path in the 20th century, but maybe, with people like Daniel, we can take it now.

If you’ve ever wondered what it will take to shift the culture, the economics, and the politics of transport, this conversation is worth your time. It’s about coal miners, Teslas, hunger strikes, trucks the size of small buildings, and optimism.

Let me know what you think of the episode in the comments, or leave us a rating on your podcast app.

The Shameless Plug Episode 5: Fred Hopley

Saul Griffith — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 05:39:53 GMT

One of the biggest questions in Australia’s (and the world’s) energy transition is this: will households be treated as full participants in the electricity market, or will we continue to be beholden to the monopoly incumbents? This feels particularly pertinent to me coming off climate week in the US, where the customer seems like the ignored sideshow in the most important component of our energy transition - household electrification.

Bloomberg made a great study this week of how the “hyperscalers” — Stanford kids selling you “AI” that you probably don’t need — have made electricity prices increase more than 200%. This mutant neoliberal plutocracy is coming to you unless we fix things.

This week on The Shameless Plug, Fiona and I speak with Fred Hopley, a software entrepreneur who has gone all-in on electrification.

His household now has:

A 15 kW rooftop solar array
A Tesla Powerwall battery
Two electric vehicles
And a home energy management system he coded himself to orchestrate it all.

The result? Fred generates 141% of his annual electricity demand and, thanks to smart use of tariffs, a negative power bill.

Fred’s success is impressive, but it also exposes the policy failures that prevent this outcome from being accessible to every Australian household. If the world wants to succeed in this energy transition (and yes Christ Wright, despite your denial there is one and we don’t need coal)

Listen to Fred's episode

Watch it on Youtube

Fred argues persuasively for symmetric tariffs. Here’s the principle:

If a household is charged 20¢ to import a kilowatt-hour from the grid, it should earn 20¢ when it exports a kilowatt-hour at that same moment.

It’s simple physics and simple fairness. Right now, that symmetry doesn’t exist. Instead, households who invest in rooftop solar and batteries are effectively penalised, while large retailers and networks capture the benefits.

Symmetric tariffs would:

Make local solar and batteries more valuable.
Encourage households to share surplus clean energy with their neighbours.
Reduce pressure on long-distance transmission by making better use of local wires.
Lower costs for everyone, especially renters and low-income households who can’t install their own systems but can benefit from cheaper daytime power.

Fred’s household is a living demonstration project. He saves around $8,000 per year compared to a fossil-fuel lifestyle: $5,000 from solar + battery savings and another $3,000 from never buying petrol or diesel.

But let’s be clear: it shouldn’t require entrepreneurial grit, coding skills, or financial privilege to access these savings.

If we want fairness in the energy transition, we need to:

Expand tariff reform: symmetric tariffs and local use-of-system charges that reflect real physics.
Protect consumers from oligopolies: don’t let the same gentailers who gamed the fossil system become gatekeepers of battery and VPP markets.
Support renters and low-income households: by fixing the landlord–tenant split incentive and ensuring subsidy programs don’t just reward those who can already afford the upfront costs.
Scale storage everywhere: at the household, community, and utility levels. The question isn’t where batteries should go; it’s how fast can we deploy them all.

Electrification is inevitable. Solar and batteries are already cheaper than fossil fuels. The only real question is whether we build a system that is:

Fair (households rewarded for the value they provide),
Efficient (making maximum use of local networks), and
Equitable (ensuring everyone, not just the wealthy, shares in the benefits).

Fred’s household is a glimpse of the future. Now it’s time for policy to catch up so every Australian family can join him. America should want this future too. But it seems like science fiction there because the utility monopoly is even stronger.

Let me know what you think of this conversation and leave us a comment and rating in your podcast app.

If you only read one thing about energy and electrification and climate this year...

Saul Griffith — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 04:30:49 GMT

Sometimes you read something that you should have written yourself. Or you stumble across a great way of summarizing a lot of things you are thinking about it. Both happened to me a few weeks ago, but before i share it with you, I want to give it some context.

Go-Karts as pain relief

For a number of years I messed around with a few mates making stoopid fast, stooopid fun go karts. I have lots of genetic arthritis, and an endorphin rush is a guaranteed method of pain relief, only it is usually to short. To make the endorphin rush last longer, you can take a drug called an endorphinase inhibitor that stops your body readsorbing the endorphins. If you take the endorphinase inhibitor before go-karting, you smile for hours afterwards and feel no pain. At least that was my excuse for spending a lot of time in CAD making the design and then making the parts.

At my 50th birthday we raced them at an old air-traffic control tower on Alameda runway. Best photo of the night is this one of my daughter Bronte lining up to race my friend Maddie. The theme of the party was "Fast and Furious", because if you know me (or my wife) you'll know one of our guilty pleasures is the Fast and Furious franchise, a highly misunderstood franchise of car chase films that is really about family and belonging. My friends dressed up.

Now that is a Dominic Toretto impersonation (though a little less smile next time).

Karts as Curriculum

Because I had the parts to build the karts from my birthday I ran a go-kart building workshop this year at my daughter's 5th grade public school, Austinmer Public. With 6 volunteers and 60 kids we built 4 go-karts over 8 weeks to teach the kids about all of the things that you need to understand our unfolding electric future.

We started with a class to make your own battery out of Gatorade (an electrolyte!) with copper coins and iron nails for electrodes. My charming dad but some nickel plate he had “stored away just in case” so we could try different metals. The kids measured the voltages and tested different colors of gatorade for higher potential. In case you are wondering blue is the highest voltage gatorade!. The kids put batteries in series and measured voltages again, then put enough batteries in series to turn to get a voltage that could turn on a light emitting diode (LED).

In the second class we hand—wound tiny electric motors, built a circuit to drive them, and used various battery combinations to spin them. We measured voltages again, as well as the revolutions per minute (RPM). We measured them spinning faster at higher voltages. One motor spun at over 20,000 rpm. If I teach the class again I'd show how different numbers of windings change the speed. We took apart an electric skateboard motor and compared our hand wound motor to the (also hound wound but by professionals) skateboard motor, and compared our crappy iron magnets to the incredible neodymniums in the professional motor. We spun the motor and measured the motor and current coming off it. A motor is a generator ! With a turbine on it, it can make electricity, even make a light turn on.

The motors reminded me of a project I used to do with the now renowned comic book artist Nick Dragotta and his wife Ingrid. We wrote comic books that taught kids how to make things. They were published by Harper Collins, then Make Magazine, and for a hot minute we made kits for parents to do with their kids. Nick has gone on to be famous including batman covers.

In the third class we made gear-boxes with lego and talked about chain drives versus worm drives versus belt drives and even about bevel gears. We did some math about ratios and fractions. We even built and contemplated a lego version of a fabulous Arthur Ganson work of art.

In a fourth class I showed the kids what CAD tools look like and how they can be used to design a mechanism, and we looked at how levers and bearings work and how they could could be arranged to make ackerman steering, and that in fact an ackerman is a version of a variable gearbox.

My dad (proud grandfather, ex-engineer) came in for a class and helped the kids build the chassis out of plywood and aluminium extrusions.

My mum came in for a class while I was travelling and helped the kids paint and decorate the karts. I learned from one of my favorite professors at MIT (Mitch Resnick) that ownership of projects is important to kids and that the chance to decorate engages them in ownership of what they are learning. Also my mother is a practising artist and former art teacher and is magnificently didactic, so the kids learned to paint with proper technique. Or else.

In two more classes the kids assembled the 4 karts in teams using allen wrenches and ratchets and screw drivers and even some power tools to take all of the fundamental components we had prototyped (battery, motor, circuit, gearboxes, mechanisms, chassis) and assembled them into karts.

We then spent a class programming the motor controllers and learning the 11-year old kid version of how motor controllers and micro-controllers work. We span the wheels up, measured their RPM, connected them all via a CAN-Bus, learned about Analog to Digital measurements (the throttles) and how you can turn movements into signals into controls, and to their great dismary how to speed limit a go-kart that can do 60mph/100km/h to 10km/h, the speed deemed safe by us adults. The kids learned that the electricity came from the battery and went into the “brain” or motor controller that turned it into pulses of electricity that would make the electromagnets in the motor turn on and off and push and pull the permanent magnets to make them spin around. The potentiometer made a voltage that could be turned into a signal from the throttle that would tell the master-miind (the microcontroller) to orchestrate the “brains” attached to each motor using a language called “CAN”. Phenomenologically they “got” it.

With 4 running go karts the last class was outside on the basketball courts, we arranged cones, wore helmets and fluoro safety vests, and had a series of races. Every kid had a drive. It was the best day of my 2024. Statistics would suggest only a few of the kids will grow up to do science or engineering, but I believe they all left with a better intuition of how the world works, of how to use tools, the fact that you don't need to be afraid of taking things apart and putting them back together, hopefully better. They understood they had built their first electric car, and there is no real difference between what they had put together, and a real electric car. All the same components, just different scales. They were a bit thrilled that in a (very short) drag race to say 60km/hour their hand painted and brightly coloured go-karts would beat nearly all modern EVs.

But even better, I had indoctrinated them with the idea that a tiny number of foundational technologies are the core to solving climate change, this electrifying energy transition thing I'm always harping on about. Its about magnets, motors, conductors, generators, motor controllers and inverters, digital control of an analog world, batteries, and the myriad ways they can all be combined to make all the things we need for a zero emission future, whether its a wind turbine or an electric vehicle.

This year I've been (very slowly with too many professional distractions) trying to refine the go-karts with a beautifully illustrated instruction manual so that in some maybe future world I'll sell kits and instructions to schools and parents and scouting groups so they can get started in their own electric education. I was in the perfect headspace to receive a substack post about "the electric slide". This is a remarkable piece of writing that talks about the fundamental technological developments of the past few centuries that all add up to the "electric stack" of technologies upon which the future is forged. This is the article I wished I had written myself, because it is awesome. I want you to read it. Warning : its very long.

If you can only read one thing about electrification this year, read “The Electric Slide” at Not Boring by Packy McCormick

How did we get batteries and with better material science, better batteries? Why is lithium fundamentally dominant? What had to happen in the development of magnets to get to the extraordinary power density of modern electric power plants? What happened to happen with silicon and transistors to enable the finely tuned digital control of these motors at extraordinary levels of power?

McCormick sets up the article with this challenging thought for those who have red-pilled on AI…

America is, implicitly or explicitly, making a bet that whoever wins intelligence, in the form of AI, wins the future.
China is making a different bet: that for intelligence to truly matter, it needs energy and action.

He defines the electric stack :

It also dominates the technologies that turn electricity into action: the Electric Stack.

Lithium-Ion Batteries
Magnets and Electric Motors
Power Electronics
Embedded Compute

He tells the story of this stack using a drone as the embodiment and forces you to consider the power and importance of the full stack. Drones, which have revolutionized vanity as well as war, are only possible when all of these things come together. This is why I was teach with a go-kart, a literal vehicle for explaining the revolution underfoot. My only criticism of both drone and kart here is that it doesn't include what we happened in solar cell innovation (and scale) and incorporate it into the final vehicle. The solar cell is of course related to embedded compute (silicon, semiconductor), but probably deserves a special shoutout.

This chart shows the incredible cost curves we are on, and they are still coming down :

I love the detail, I love the history and the story telling. It is a very long thing to ask you to read, but I promise you it will be worth it, and even if you think you know the history you will learn a ton, and if you don't you'll have a new appreciation of the modern world.

As well as covering the science I also appreciate the attempt to tie all of the electric stack to geopolitics, and to point out that it was a large number of migrants working in American Universities under the now undermined post WW2 US science establishment, to invent all of these things. Except also in partnership with people in Japan and Germany and Britain and elsewhere who were also building these fundamental building blocks of modernity, and contemplating what it means that it is all being taken to extraordinary manufacturing scale in China, not America.

In the 8 point summary McCormack says some great things about this and says them well :

Lesson 4: talent is destiny, and that talent can come from anywhere.
Lesson 5: American innovation in the Electric Stack consistently came through partnerships with other countries.

China has bet on the fundamental physicality of electrification, robotics, drones, clean energy, just as America is pulling back from those things, and investing in burning fossil fuels and artificial intelligence. As anyone in software will acknowledge, eventually software will be free, (but not the energy to run it) so I doubt there is much long term advantage to “winning” this race. I find the “we must get it first, it’s existential” narrative disingenuous and politlcally motivated.

I buy the argument that owning and manufacturing the electric stack is fundamental to prosperity, and unlike software, supply chains do not tend towards "free". I don't think the framing of one versus the other is very helpful. The best of all worlds of course is using all this artificial intelligence (I still STRONGLY PREFER THE TERM MACHINE LEARNING) to further empower the electric stack. Its not impossible to imagine China and America both doing well here, if only we could dial the temperature down.

In my “go-kart as electric stack” I was thinking battery, electric motors, motor controllers, sensors, and precision mechanisms as the stack. Its not that different to McCormack’s architecture of Batteries, Motors, Power Electronics, and Compute. Sensors are a subcategory of compute, and precision mechanisms are only really enabled by CNC machine which is the accuracy enabled when compute meets manufacturing with servo motors sensors and control. All of these things feedback and develop on eachother.

I really can’t criticize the piece, but I think both McCormack and I miss in our breakdowns another important thing that is happening in the stack. Electrochemistry. With precision and compute and electricity we are also fundamentally changing the basics of industrial chemistry. These are the ways we are going to make metals and even things like cement in the future. This is how we will decarbonize industry. A lot of industrial chemistry is driven by redox reactions, which are nothing if not reactions designed for moving electrons around. Oxidation is the loss of electrons. Reduction is the gaining of electrons. We are electrifying everything, including our mining and metal making and most important industrial processes.

In other news :

I'm at climate week in NY this week. I may miss a post or two. If you are in NY contact me!. If you know an event I should go to at climate week contact me!

If you think you would like to buy a go kart for your kid or their school, or just for a school, or even just for the arthritic pain relief, let me know. If I should do some pre-order thing, shout out.

I read "Stuck" this week by Yoni Applebaum. Its an awesome dive into the diminished mobility of Americans in terms of their geographic location, and how this is an important underlying cause for stagnation. As an explanation for why we have over-regulation and land use practices that is stymying the housing market (and the electricity grid buildout by the way) I found it better than both "Abundance" and "Why Nothing Works" (though you should read all those anyway, because they are also good).

I'm going to get back to the topic of how to make electricity cheap. I'm getting a lot of feedback from my American audience that they would like that.

Climate change is going to be bad in Australia, and this is a remarkably not sugar coated report “National Climate Assessment”. A week later the labor government released new targets. They aren’t good enough for capping us at 2 degrees. This was a good analysis of Australia’s new goals. At least Australia didn’t pull out of the UN (Paris) targets like the US has, but we aren’t trying very hard considering that it will save us money not cost us. The problem is that even though many people and companies and industries will win, there are some existing big players who would lose. As I learned in the Quarterly essay this week they are sneaky, duplicitous, and very powerful.

The Shameless Plug Episode 4: Heat pump hot water systems with Karl Jensen

Saul Griffith — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 20:09:47 GMT

It’s not quite true to say no one has an emotional relationship with their hot water heaters. My friend Karl Jensen does - he spends most of his waking hours thinking about them and their role in loweing energy bills and carbon emissions.

Karl works at iStore, an Australian heat pump company. He’s a full-blown EV nerd, a hands-on engineer, and a tireless volunteer at electrification events. He runs a podcast called Just Another Solar Podcast and spends his free time drag racing two souped-up Teslas (still undefeated). His social feeds are packed with myth-busting and practical advice on how to electrify your life.

Karl is our latest guest on The Shameless Plug.

Listen to The Shameless Plug

Watch the full episode on Youtube

When Karl talks hot water, he’s not just making small talk. Heat pumps are one of the quiet heroes of the energy transition - last year, the number of heat pump hot water systems installed in Australia increased by 70%.

“Heat pump water heaters are a massive part of our transition to all-electric homes,” Karl says. “It’s a previously underestimated sector of the renewable picture.”

Why? Because they use the heat already in the air or ground, rather than burning through energy to create it. That means far lower bills and carbon emissions. And when you pair a smart heat pump with rooftop solar, you can run your hot water on sunshine.

Karl recommends smart hot water systems that integrate with solar inverters or the grid. These units can “listen” for when the sun is shining and kick on then, storing free hot water for later.

Of course, Karl doesn’t stop at hot water. His house is a showroom for the electric future: two water heaters, three home heat pumps, an induction cooktop, 26.6 kW of rooftop solar spread across 69 panels, two Teslas, and a hot tub.

Let us know what you think about Karl’s episode, and please leave us a rating or comment in your podcast app to reach more ears.

The Shameless Plug Episode 3: Dan Adams is rewiring the energy market

Saul Griffith — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 23:22:55 GMT

In this episode of The Shameless Plug, Fiona and I sat down with Dan Adams, co-founder of Amber Electric, to explore your electricity bill and how it works, why electricity retailers are edisincentivised from having you engage with your bill, why batteries are so important, and how to trade your battery’s capacity profitably in the electricity market.

Not your typical energy retailer, Amber is giving households and businesses the power to be active participants in the electricity market. By trading batteries directly into the grid, they’re helping people get rewarded for using energy wisely - and making it possible for everyday Australians to shape how our energy system evolves.

I’m bullish on the idea that the energy system that is emerging globally is one where households, via their electrification, their solar generation, and their batteries, should actually be understood as infrastructure. This is important because globally governments enable monopolies in energy infrastructure to reap guaranteed returns on their investments in that infrastructure. I believe this justifies the question of whether they should be doing the same for the households that are contributing to the infrastructure. Dan is enabling that reality, and together we dabble a little in imagining what that means for how we might design and regulate electricity markets.

To give you perspective on just how important that is, on Monday of this week (the 8th) Renewables met 76.4% of electricity demand in Australia, and rooftop solar — the infrastructure owned by Australian households — met 43.7% of demand. We (the royal we) are the infrastructure.

Watch on Youtube

In our conversation, we unpack:

How electricity markets really work (and why they aren’t as mysterious as they seem).
Why your current bill might not be working in your favour - and how Amber flips that on its head.
What it means for the electrified future when homes and businesses can act as active players in balancing the grid.
What the hell is happening with vehicle-to-grid and why we need a renters-v2G car scheme.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts

In other news:

This is kind of an important thing to realise : China is driving global emissions reduction. The NYT finally said it. Here’s the full report by Ember. This is why America’s panic stricken and ideological turn back to fossil fuels is going to end poorly. There isn’t enough media coverage of the global tariff extortion being used to force people to buy expensive American gas (compared to the lifetime cost benefits of electric solutions). My book Electrify hoped dearly that America would lead in this decarbonization and even partner with China. The ode to America’s capacity to rapidly scale things up as it did with the “arsenal of democracy” in WWII now looks a little naive, given that China has now done it.

It is not quite too late — America could be a major player in financing the global energy transition, something that it is good at and could be demoninated in $US. The margins on energy hardware are low, there is more to be made in financing this energy transition than there is in manufacturing the component parts. There could have been a US — China partnership here and It just might be too late if America goes 3 more years selling expensive gas and undermining the $US with cryptocurrency schemes.

Let us know what you think about the podcast in the comments below. Or share the episode and leave us a rating.

The Shameless Plug Episode 2: Dr Kim Loo on kitchen diplomacy and climate solutions

Saul Griffith — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 22:23:08 GMT

I’m currently in WA on my book tour, so I am sending you two new podcast episodes to listen to this week. Last week on The Shameless Plug, Fiona and I spoke to one of my favourite climate activists who embodies the power of persuasion and grassroots climate action: Dr Kim Loo.

Kim is a doctor (General Practitioner) from Western Sydney and a long-time member of Australia’s Doctors for the Environment. She is also the chair of Asian Australians for Climate Solutions, connecting communities and empowering individuals with ways they can contribute to getting out of our climate dilemma.

Kim describes multiple types of diplomacy she uses to encourage people to join the solution train. One of them is “chicken diplomacy” where she demonstrates her organic garden and chickens and they way they contribute to both cooling her house and feeding the family. She also practices what she calls “kitchen diplomacy” — running induction wok cooking classes for sceptical home cooks. This is especially important with ethnic communities that are reluctant to change cooking methods for traditional dishes. Kim shows firsthand how electrification can be not just healthier and cleaner, but delicious. Kim even persuaded her 84-year-old mum to get rid of her gas cooktop.

In this episode, Kim shares:

Why doctors have a vital role to play in climate advocacy and the multitudinous ways that climate change is already negatively affecting the health of her patients.
The time she was featured in tabloid The Daily Telegraph as an early adopter of electrification.
The personal story behind her mission to electrify kitchens, homes, and communities.

If you’ve ever wondered how to bring people along on the electrification journey -especially those who are hesitant - this episode will give you plenty of inspiration (and maybe even some cooking tips).

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple

Watch on Youtube

Let me know what you think of The Shameless Plug so far. Leave me a comment here, or give the show a rating in your podcast player.

Batteries and bottlenecks... Copper and Cooking

Saul Griffith — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 03:40:26 GMT

5 or so years ago, mid-pandemic, I was working closely with my friend Sam Calisch, and we realised that batteries are a solution to bottlenecks in the wiring of our electrical system - and I mean the larger electrical system from turbines down to toasters. These bottlenecks can happen anywhere, whether it be an under-rated circuit within the house, an under-rated main panel or switchboard, an under-rated local distribution network, or a transmission bottleneck on the bulk power network. We are asking electricity to do more, and it is stretching the capacity of our wiring.

This is Charlie, Copper’s first product, a 30in oven and cooktop.

Our specific realisation is that the last metre (yard?) of wiring may be even more critical than the last mile (km?), as replacing circuits in a home for high amperage equipment is expensive, difficult, and disruptive. The induction stove is a perfect example. High performance induction stoves — the ones that absolutely outperform natural gas cooking — need something higher than your average 10 or 15 Amp circuit to perform as desired. This is an esepcially big problem in North America and other countries pinned to 110V, but still a problem in 220/230/240V jurisdictions.

In most places cooking isn’t a constant activity however, so why not trickle charge a battery in the stove when it is not cooking, such that we can pour energy into it when necessary later. A few hundred dollars worth of batteries in the stove (or appliance) negates what can be a thousands to tens of thousand dollar wiring upgrade to the kitchen. A whole lot of other benefits accrue to the house, such as the possibility of using this battery to power the fridge in the case of a grid outage. Of course the benefits of significantly lowering indoor air-pollution, and of course making all electric cooking zero emission, as well as lowering the cost of cooking are the huge benefits. Easier cleaning and safer cooking are yet more advantages. Its just better.

With these insights Sam and I filed a patent, wrote proposals to the DOE (Department Of Energy) and started a company. In an America that may not exist anymore after the Trump administration eviscerates science and clean energy we were fortunate enough to get a research award from the DOE to begin proving the benefits of this technology to the homeowner and to the grid at large.

The personal side of Copper (or Channing Street Copper in its previous long-form) is a wonderful story of mentorship and collegiaility. I regularly visit and it is like visiting multiple generations of former colleagues, many of whom had their first internship or first job with me or with Otherlab. Sam Calisch — the CEO — had one of his first jobs with me at Otherlab when I was a new dad, and as well as working on lots of interesting things would sit my infant son on his lap and show him google image searches of blueberries and construction equipment. This would allow exhausted first time dad (me) to nap mid afternoon. That same son is now 16 and just did an internship with Copper and helped design and build some calibration and measurement tools. The circle of life.

Eric who works there was the CEO of another company we built successfully called Instructables.com which was an early internet platform for DIY instructions. Instructables sold to Autodesk.

Tucker, also critical to operations at Copper cut his teeth building a company with me that we ultimately sold to a consortium of vehicle companies and OEMs. Volute invented, designed and pioneered the manufacturing processes for pressure vessels that filled space more effectively than traditional tanks, and thus had application in many things including hydrogen and gas storage in alternative fuel vehicles.

I’ve worked with Dan, Pushan, Mitch, Josh, on multiple projects over multiple years including solar vehicles, wind energy, new fabrication technologies, robotics, and more.

This multi-generational entrepreneurial soup is the kind of thing that thrives in the American innovation ecosystem that includes federal funding for early stage technology de-risking, and the concentrated intellectual capital of cities like San Francisco and Boston that have venture capital and good universities. It is the thing that is at risk under the Trump administration and DOGE’s ideological cancelling of all manner of research funds, projects, universities, and agencies. Copper itself had a new DOE research contract cancelled mid-stream by DOGE. I thought Elon was on team electrification?

Funding of hardware companies in Silicon Valley is extremely difficult. Software returns are faster and more predictable and have growth curves that make the comparatively slow growth by sales of physical hardware look less attractive. Its for these reasons that I’m extra proud that in a very difficult financing environment for climate hardware (the US right now) that Copper just closed a round of financing to bring the technology to scale. I’ll paste in their press release below so as not to butcher their bragging rights. I’m so proud of this company I helped launch as it achieves its mission to make appliances better while solving our climate challenge.

Copper lands $28 million financing to scale technology behind world’s first battery-equipped induction range
Copper’s award-winning range is easy to install, offers powerful and precise cooking, supports the electric grid, and creates a healthier and safer kitchen.
Berkeley, CA, EMBARGOED TO 9AM ET, August 27th, 2025 — Copper started shipping its award-winning induction range last fall, officially launching a new category of battery-equipped home appliances. The internal battery not only gives a serious performance boost, but also supports the grid and avoids expensive electrical upgrades to buildings. Now, Copper is closing a $28 million Series A financing to expand its operations into new markets and products.
The financing, a combination of equity and debt, was led by Prelude Ventures, which invests in startups with the greatest potential to mitigate climate change. The round also includes Building Ventures, as well as existing investors Voyager, Collaborative Fund, Climactic, Designer Fund, Necessary Ventures, Leap Forward Ventures, and Climate Capital.
Copper has already shipped nearly a thousand of its ranges to customers around the U.S., with overwhelmingly positive response. NYT Wirecutter called it “the holy grail of induction,” and the product garnered top honors from design outlets Core77 and the IDSA. Copper itself was one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2025.
“Copper has built a category-defining company,” said Mark Cupta, Managing Director at Prelude Ventures. “We were particularly impressed with the team’s relentless execution and capital efficiency, the scale of their vision, and the strength of their patent portfolio covering batteries in appliances.”
While Copper sells directly on its website, the majority of its business comes from B2B sales to owners of buildings and real estate portfolios. These customers often face steep costs to repair aging gas distribution pipes or upgrade outdated electrical infrastructure. Copper solves both problems, saving significant capital and complexity, all while retiring the gas infrastructure and delivering premium performance and resilience to the building residents. In a noteworthy demonstration of demand, the New York Housing Authority recently awarded Copper a contract for 10,000 units, which came with stated interest from related parties for an additional 300,000+.
Once deployed, batteries embedded in Copper’s stoves and other appliances provide support to the electric grid, acting as a virtual power plant (VPP). Copper first piloted its California VPP in the summer of 2024, with a network of distributed energy storage assets providing verified capacity and reducing dependence on expensive gas peaker plants. Deploying batteries inside residential appliances offers a cost-effective way to get energy storage to the edge of the grid, where it’s most valuable.
“This new capital will enable Copper to continue to scale its technology platform into additional products, helping millions of people upgrade their homes, ditch gas, and support the clean grid,” said Sam Calisch, CEO and co-founder of Copper.
About Copper
Copper designs and builds beautiful, high-performance appliances that make electrification the obvious choice. Based in Berkeley, California, Copper’s first product is a battery-equipped induction stove that plugs into a regular 120V outlet, enabling cooks to easily upgrade from gas to induction without costly, complex electrical upgrades. To learn more, visit www.copperhome.com.
About Prelude Ventures
Prelude Ventures is a climate-focused venture capital firm that invests in and supports early-stage startups with the greatest potential to mitigate climate change. For over a decade, Prelude Ventures has sought out purpose-driven founders and provided the capital and expertise needed to build the next generation of category-defining businesses that will reshape our global economy for the greater good of people and the planet. Located in San Francisco, Prelude Ventures has approximately $2 billion under management.
Media Contact: prelude@launchsquad.com

And in other news

In the other goings on of my too-busy electrification life are some new podcast episodes I’m on, as well as the launching of my own new podcast, “The Shameless Plug”.

I was on my mate (and energy policy guru) Leah Stokes’ podcast “A Matter of Degrees” which you can link to here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7366153398875758592/

I was also recorded on tour for the SwitchedOn podcast — probably saying things I don’t want going public

And the fabulous Anne Delaney of Renew Economy apparently heard me say out loud that we need a consumer led revolt to get the regulatory changes required and appropriate design for a lowest cost energy system : https://reneweconomy.com.au/saul-griffiths-call-to-arms-he-wants-a-consumer-army-to-lead-fight-for-cheapest-energy-system/

Another old mate, the inimitable Sarah Lazarovic, has a new substack, More Vibrant Planet. check it out.

Introducing The Shameless Plug

Saul Griffith — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 02:01:28 GMT

I’ve spent the better part of two decades talking and writing about the need to electrify everything. From our homes and cars, to our grids and communities, electrification is the most practical, immediate, and inspiring pathway to cutting emissions while saving money and creating jobs.

But here’s the truth: talking to policymakers and engineers isn’t enough. To really make this transition stick, we need everyday stories. We need humour. We need a space where people can ask the “silly” questions (spoiler: they’re never silly) and find practical answers. We need to plug into each other.

So… I’ve started a podcast. It’s called The Shameless Plug.

Each week, I’ll sit down with innovators, community leaders, experts, and the early adopters to talk about what electrification really looks like in practice. Each episode, I’m joined by my mate, social researcher Fiona Whitelaw to keep my ‘energy nerd’ under control.

We’ll also dive into the regulatory and political stuff - and why our dinner table decisions matter more than we think, and how collective action at the household level can reshape our economy from the ground up.

Expect some laughs, some nerdy detours, and plenty of plain-English answers.

The first episode is now live, and I’d love you to give it a listen. In this episode, Fiona and I speak to Chris Kerr who started his electrification journey in 2020 during COVID lockdown when he spent money intended for an overseas holiday on rooftop solar. Soon, he'd electrified his cooking, heating, cooling, vehicles, and installed a battery on his six-person home.

For his family of six, electrification has brought a return on investment, a return on comfort and a return on environment. Watch the full interview below and let me know what you think in the comments.

Subscribe to The Shameless Plug wherever you get your podcasts, follow the podcast on Youtube, share it with a friend, and send me your questions.

This is a movement, not just a podcast. And I’m shamelessly plugging it because the future depends on all of us plugging in.

What is productivity anyway? Electrification is economic productivity!

Francis Vierboom — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 09:14:24 GMT

(This post was meant to go out last week, but i forgot to push some critical buttons on this substack thing so sorry, its going out now, which means you’ll get a lot of posts from me this week).

I work with fabulous groups of people at Rewiring Australia, Rewiring America, and Rewiring New Zealand (and hopefully soon this will get rolled into Rewiring the World). There is a lot of good work done by the various groups that I hope to highlight or preview here in order to propagate the ideas.

Going back a long way we realized that because electrification is financed at fixed costs into the future, and fossil fuels exhibit not only price volatility but inflation, that electrication can be anti-inflationary. If you buy and finance solar today your energy costs stay fixed 20 years into the future. Same with your electric vehicle and water heater and stove. This is part of the economic savings of going all electric. Below is a graph we made way back in 2022.

Since then we have shown the enormous micro-economic win for households, and abstracted that into the macro-economic win for whole countries of electrification. This is particularly true of the residential, commercial, and transportation sectors, which is our homes and small businesses. It will eventually be true for industry as well as the more efficient all electric processes for making steel and cement will begin to displace gas in industry because the economics will work.

Here is the Australian report on electrification being anti-inflationary : https://www.rewiringaustralia.org/report/electrification-is-anti-inflationary

And here is the macro-economic upside for Aotearoa (New Zealand) https://www.rewiring.nz/tomorrow and the key graph from the report. $11bN in economic savings per year should a few million kiwi homes go all electric.

Doing something with lower cost has traditionally been called higher economic productivity, and the case is now overwhelmingly closed, that for large portions of economies, basically everything apart from heavy industry, electrification is more economically productive. Australia loves a roundtable and a report, and so our ears pricked up at the idea that we could prove our case formally that electrification is the way forward for economic productivity and that there were huge opportunities for the government and for every day Australians to invest in that.

To state our position on the matter I’m going to let Francis Vierboom, CEO of Rewiring Australia take the reigns of my substack:

Francis Vierboom - CEO of Rewiring Australia on "Electrification and Economic Productivity”.

If you’re reading this somewhere in the world outside Australia, a bit of context: back in May we re‑elected our centre-left Labor government with a stonking majority, flattening the right wing coalition of parties that continues to play footsie with outright climate denial (and continues to get smashed at the ballot box, especially in their former wealthy urban heartland seats, as a result).

A series of productivity‑focused ‘roundtables’ organised by the Government is now underway, looking to shape the agenda for the coming term - and start the conversation about some hard reforms Australia needs (because now literally any reform at all is apparently ‘hard’).

Traditionally in Australia, the ‘productivity’ conversation is mostly about figuring out ways to help employers make their workforce do longer hours for less pay or remove regulation. But there’s another option, and this is what we’ve outlined and what we’ll be talking about when we join the Climate and Energy Minister’s round table this week…

Let's do more with less and electrify everything.

The biggest opportunity to advance productivity and well-being in Australia is ready to go: let’s switch our inefficient fossil-fueled machines over to electricity.

We can generate vast amounts of electricity from renewables and the supply chain required to deliver that energy is the quiet hum of the electricity grid we already have, replacing the enormous system of mines, oil rigs, ships and trucks required to deliver 127 million tonnes of fossil fuels globally every day. When that energy gets to its destination, electric machines are far more efficient than their fossil fuel equivalents.

Switching from fossil fuels to electricity will be a huge structural upgrade to Australian productivity. Electrification unlocks an energy-abundant, economically efficient and environmentally sustainable future.

1. Electric homes do more with less.

Switching from gas to electric hot water, heating and cooking slashes energy usage (and energy bills). We can wind up gas connections and the residential gas network, removing billions of dollars of costs in infrastructure. We can power it with Aussie rooftop solar, the cheapest energy on earth, and batteries and electric vehicles in the garage able to store and use it around the clock. Throw in some e-bikes charged up for the quick shop and school runs to reduce congestion, and electric boats and jetskis parked in the driveway ready to rule the weekend: the all-electric households of the future are an upgrade to look forward to. Rewiring Australia details the savings for all-electric homes in 2025 in our latest Tipping Point report.

Rewiring Australia analysis. Residential Baseline Study 2021 average home energy needs. ABS motor vehicle survey 2018 average driving per vehicle. 1.8 vehicles per home.

We can accelerate this upgrade for everyone with a straightforward agenda. Let’s:

Provide flexible, consumer-friendly, property-secured deferred finance to help everyone afford the upfront costs;
Fix the rental housing market with the minimum standards and incentives to make sure renters get upgraded homes too; and
Extend the SRES subsidies to electric cooking, heating and bidirectional EV charging and get the rest of the electrification job done.

2. Electric transport does more with less.

Australia pays a lot - $160m every day - to import fuels. We could be driving EVs fueled by local solar instead for a fraction of the cost. And if we can lower the cost of transport, in a country with almost the most kilometres of roads per capita in the world, we’re lowering the structural cost of groceries, farming supplies, emergency services, building materials - the benefits flow through the whole economy.

Rewiring Australia analysis. ABS motor vehicle survey 2018 average driving distance. Vehicle efficiency from US EPA fuel economy database comparing common Australian vehicles. ‘Mixed charging’ is 50% solar, 35% grid, 15% public charging.

We should accelerate the switch to EVs:

Continue policies that drive new car buyers to choose electric - the FBT exemption is popular and working well;
Target specific incentives and rebates for EVs to car owners who drive the most - the nurses, tradies, teachers and commuters who pay the highest petrol bills. About half of all driving is done by just 20% of vehicles - these busiest vehicles should be the priority to switch;
Reduce upfront EV costs by offering an upfront discount that’s funded by an increased annual registration fee - ensuring more Australians afford to make the switch sooner, while still net saving every year thanks to lower fuel costs.

3. A rooftop solar and battery-powered grid does more with less.

Replacing petrol and gas with electricity will nearly triple the demand on our electricity system. Fortunately, our electricity systems can move a lot more energy - we just need to maximise demand at the right times, and use storage spread throughout our homes and neighbourhoods. Instead of expensive upgrades to powerlines to serve occasional peak bursts, EVs and hot water can soak up solar during the day, and batteries can ‘smooth’ our electricity usage with charging and discharging. The more we can make, store and use electricity close to where it’s needed, the less we need to add to the electricity grid.

The grid can do more with less and help electrify everything. We should:

Reform and streamline neighbourhood battery deployment - getting the land planning approvals, connection timelines and pricing offers right;
Raise SRES size limits for solar and battery support and encourage larger commercial solar and battery installations; and
Incentivise or mandate workplaces to offer EV charging to employees to maximise daytime charging from solar.

—————————————

(Back to Saul’s voice here)

This economic case has not been simply enough made in the US. It is now choosing climate and energy policies that are going to make it a far less efficient economy with lower productivity. China on the other hand will continue to improve its economic productivity as it leads the world in electrification, both in deployment of nuclear and renewables, and in deployment of EVs. I’m hoping to work with more economists globally to make this case, such that first tier economists can be influencing faster decarbonization through electrification.

This week I’m on my “Faster and Fairer” book tour of Northern NSW and Queensland :

https://www.rewiringaustralia.org/events

Come along !

I’ve also been reading a ton (listening to books for the large part). These were great, and perhaps I’ll have time to do book reviews and why I was reading these particular books and what I hoped to and/or did get out of them.

The Meritocracy Trap - Daniel Markovits, How the elite corrupted our meritocratic institutions and created more inequality.

How to Feed the World - Vaclav Smil. I don’t love all of Smil’s books and I believe he gets some things fundamentally wrong about the global energy transition, but I did love this book about food, great data and statistics, and a very realistic incrementalist view of how we will improve our food systems.

The Upswing - Robert Putnam. I loved Bowling Alone, and this is Putnam’s long awaited follow up. It is optimistic that culture can return to more of a “we” culture from an “I” culture, an argument Putnam makes with data from the guilded age until today.

Make Electricity Cheap Again, Part 2.

Saul Griffith — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 21:05:05 GMT

Most media outlets do a terrible job describing the price of energy, particular the price of electricity. You have all heard the headlines about the cost of wind power and solar power being so cheap, and even the addage that nuclear will be “too cheap to meter”. All of these conflate the cost of generating electricity with the cost of delivering electricity. They aren’t nearly the same. The cost of electricity begins with the cost of generating it, but then must also include the cost of transmission, distribution, metering, retail, connection fees, and some times social and environmental levies. This is well illustrated in Figure 4.3 of “Plug-In”.

I hate pie charts, but lets look at this as a pie chart. If you want the US explanation of why electricity prices are complicated try this : https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/prices-and-factors-affecting-prices.php

In Australia the distribution component is the largest cost. Generation is second, retail and connection fees are third.

In the US generation cost is the highest, followed by distribution, then connection and transmission. Data and models from NREL are here. I’d love to have this data state by state.

I suspect that the distribution cost is the biggest variable in the difference between say California and Idaho as exhibited in this chart of state by state costs compared to US national average.

The categories are not exactly the same, and I hate using national averages as the variations are so huge, but nevertheless it is illustrative to compare Australian and US retail electricity prices, even if we do the most naive conversion at today’s exchange rate.

And at the risk of too many (never?) graphs, comparing each component side by side shows a huge difference.

On most things the costs are similar, Australia’s generation costs average a little more, and transmission a little less, but the big difference is in distribution costs. Only some of this can be ascribed to the lower population density of Australia, and some of it is no doubt related to the Hilmer reforms which divided the vertical utility into the subcomponents of generation, transmission, distribution and retail. As these things were being privatized one theory of the resulting cost increase is the government had to guarantee returns and allow gold plating (over-investment) in the distribution component in order to sell off (privatize) those assetts. It made the price of electricity increase. This is easily observed in the long run average price of Australian electricity that trended strongly upwards after the reforms.

We can throw blame here in a few different directions, but the real point is figuring out how to lower the cost of electricity. The interesting thing we know about electrification, particularly household electrification, is that it cuts the total amount of energy a household uses by more than half, but it will very likely increase the amount of electricity any house uses by a factor of 2-3. I use a figure of 250% as a proxy, which is roughly true both in the USA and in AUS. I have dozens of graphs on this topic for various countries, and they are similar enough that you can generalize this phenomenon - I’ve chosen one at random to show below.

So here is the thing about electrification, we are going to deliver double or triple the electricity over the same wires. This is possible because currently the wires are not super highly utilized, in fact the capacity factor of distribution systems is typically 25-40%. This is because the systems are rated for a maximum amount of power, corresponding to the peak, typically either a summer peak with air conditioning loads at 6 pm when everyone also comes home and starts to cook and turn on the TV and lights. It some climates it might also be a winter peak when everyone comes home and heats the homes. The rest of the time the wires are only lightly used, and the total use averages out at 25-40%. But there is going to be a huge number of batteries in the near future, on homes, in cars, and even mounted in our distribution system. (It is an interesting question to think about where the cheapest batteries will be — the cars, the grid, or the home — but I’ll leave that for a future post). Anyway, with lots of batteries, and even by doing things like charging (heating) your hot water systems when the demand is low, we can increase the utilization of the wires, often at low or no cost. This can have a profound effect on the cost of electricity.

Keep the wires warm all day…

If you can distribute twice the electricity over the distribution network by “keeping the wires warm” as my colleague Francis Veirboom likes to say, it has multiple knock on effects. As a naive exercise I run this logic for the “average” American electricity price.

The first bar of this graph shows the current price of electricity, about 18c/kWh. I assume that we push 200% of electricity over the same wires to the same home, and that smart meters halve the cost of reading the meter. The metering cost goes down by 4X. The cost of retail and distribution goes down by 200%. I fudged a tiny decrease in generation cost of 1c/kWh because wind and solar is just that cheap now, and nuclear could be. About 6c/kWh is avoided (column 3) and you can see the average price falls to 12c/kWh. For shits and giggles I modeled the same house getting 25% of that 200% electricity from a rooftop solar array at a relatively expensive (by Australian standards) $1/W installed cost. That portion of the electricity finances out at about 5c/kWh. The average cost of that household’s electricity is now hovering around 10c/kWh. Bigger roof, more solar, 50% of the electricity is coming from rooftops, and we have just about 8c/kWh. It is already cost effective to electrify a US home in most places. If you halve the cost of electricity it is a screaming deal worth thousands of dollars per year to the average household.

In Australia if you deliver 280% of the electricity over the same wires with some rooftop solar you halve the distribution component of electricity and discount the retail cost of electricity by around 25%.

Electricity is becoming more digital and more fungible with batteries and smart meters and rooftop solar. We can utilize our transmission and distribution networks at far higher rates. An excellent study and follow up blogs by Energy Consumers Australia highlights this opportunity and calls for new methods by which we measure and incentivize network utilization.

The analysis here is coarse. There are likely some network costs in power electronics and storage (batteries) to enable all of this. The vision requires market reform and incentives for neighbors to share their electricity in peer-to-peer trading under the substation. In Australia this is sometimes called LUOS its tempting and being looked at in the context of community scale batteries.

But the implication is obvious, we can make electricity cheap, and network utilization is key, and increased electrification is a huge opportunity to lower electricity costs because of that increased utilization. Ballpark, this should represent the opportunity to lower the cost of electricity in the US by a quarter, and if coupled with high penetration of rooftop solar, by half.

Yes, let’s electrify everything, but let’s make electricity cheap. If we want to prove the case that energy can be cheap through electricfication so we can beat the climate deniers with an economic argument instead of a failing moral one, then we need to keep those wires warm.

Average electricity cost :

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a