All Electric America: A Climate Solution and the Hopeful Future Paperback – January 14, 2016

Once again, Dave Freeman has done what should have been done a long time ago--written a book that lays out a logical and useful path to solving climate change in the lifetime of many people living today. This might be Freeman's best book, since it addresses a critical question and without much ideology, provides solutions that have already proven they can work. The language is clear , the organization is appropriate, and the conclusions are thoughtful. One cannot read this book without coming away with an optimistic belief that we, as humans, can handle this problem. Curing cancer and ending world hunger may be beyond us, but converting to an all-electric future can be done. We have the science and we have the policies, we just need the political will and the perseverance.Well done, Dr. Freeman!

(First published on Lenz Blog)All-Electric America was written by S. David Freeman, who was born in 1926 and has a long career as CEO of various energy companies. The second author is Leah Y. Parks, a journalist covering the electricity sector.The Kindle edition of this book (which I read) was published in October 2015.This is an excellent book. I strongly recommend reading it.The authors make the case for a 100 percent renewable energy system. Actually, the title is slightly misleading. They are talking about “all renewable”, not “all electric”.They note that solar and wind energy is cheap enough to completely displace fossil fuel in the United States. And, as Kees van der Leun highlighted in this Tweet, they wrote:US deserts are gold mines for solar power, and its central region is a veritable Saudi-Arabia of wind.Their case is motivated by global warming, for which they use the interesting rhetoric device of calling it “climate hell”.But it does not depend on recognizing this danger. The transition to renewable makes economic sense even without that particular motivation.They don’t like the nuclear option, citing proliferation concerns, dangers from radiation, and the failure of nuclear to deliver low prices.The most interesting proposal was a call for utilities to own the batteries in electric vehicles. That would of course instantly make those electrical vehicles cheaper purchases than gasoline cars. Since fuel costs are already cheaper, such a move could massively accelerate electric vehicle adoption.I am not sure what exactly the business model would be. The value for the utility comes from using the car batteries as grid storage capacity. And maybe from using this as a sales point to keep the car owner as a customer.Figuring out how this makes economic sense for an utility looks like an interesting question.Of course, if it turns out that this would lose money for the utility under present market conditions, one could think about establishing a feed-in tariff for electricity from car battery storage as an alternative to get this done quickly.One point where I don’t agree with the authors is at location 371. There they write:Fossil fuel companies surely to want to burn it all.There’s a grammar mistake in that sentence. But that’s not the reason I disagree.Fossil fuel companies want high prices for their products. Guess what happens to those prices if there is a decision to leave 75% in the ground?The authors note that fossil fuel use needs to decrease by 3% each year to phase them out in the time frame left under a 2 degrees scenario.Just assume for a moment that the fossil fuel industry agrees and sets up a mining schedule (like Bitcoin has) that does exactly that, and is calculated to leave 75% in the ground.Obviously, such a decision would instantly lead to massively higher oil prices. Which is great news for the fossil fuel industry in the short term.It is also great news in the long term. Remember that while oil eventually can’t be burned any more, you can always use it as raw material in the chemical industry without CO2 emissions. Even now, more than 10 percent of oil use is non-fuel.So even now, the fossil fuel companies don’t want to burn all the oil.And their interest would be to agree with the authors and Bill McKibben and start reducing their production massively.

Both authors have extensive experience in energy and resource management. Mr. Freeman headed the TVA; later, appointed president of the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners in 2005, he directed the conversion of Port vehicles to clean power. Ms. Parks holds a B.A. in international relations from the University of Wisconsin and an M.S. incivil and environmental engineering from Stanford University. She has done extensive professional work on water projects, resource allocation, and energy storage and distribution.Writing in terms accessible to ordinary Americans, they describe the renewable-energy options that are available, focusing on solar and wind. They report on the current status of these options, that now are cost competitive in many areas of the country, and are becoming less expensive at rapid rates. Finally they present a plan that aims at cutting back U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases fast enough to keep the world under the 2°C threshold, a goal the world's scientists consider to be vitally necessary. It is a radically ambitious plan, but in my judgment a feasible one -- for the obstacles are mainly political rather than technical.However, there is in my opinion one major technical shortcoming. That is their categorical dismissal of nuclear power. They label fission reactors of all types as inherently dangerous. The book also has a relatively high number of grammatical and factual errors.Despite this, I will recommend it for its audacious plan, its descriptions of tools any homeowner can use, like the various kinds of heat pumps, and its notes and index.

The authors lay out a clear, logical plan to transfer America to a clean, renewable all-electric nation by 2050. They present a sequence of logical steps we can take to wean this nation off of fossil fuels. It's a clear plan that we can follow, year by year. Trains, Planes, Automobiles, Factories, homes and office space, they have it all covered. In addition,they show how to provide jobs for those displaced by the transformation and show how this change will benefit our economy. The technology is there today. They mention some of the promising but unproven technologies, but their plan doesn't rely on anything that is currently pie-in-the-sky. The only thing we may be lacking as a nation is the courage. America has lead the world with bold ideas in the past from the national highway system to sending a man to the moon. It's time for the next great transformation from the age of fossil fuels to the age of clean, renewable energy. I highly recommend this book.

All sorts of great information about the advantages of solar and wind electric generation, except that it doesn't work when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. If pigs could fly... They offer no meaningful suggestions about storage, and without storage all they say about wind and solar is pretty much pie in the sky. Their analysis of nuclear seems superficial, if not biased.