You Loved the Hydrogen Ladder (I know, Version 6.0 is long overdue!), meet the Electrification Staircase. Electrify Everything is dead; long live Electrify Almost Everything. And here's the road map.
Thank you, I found the value in the hydrogen ladder to be in disabusing the notion that hydrogen could be anything, and soon. This is a good first step, but the competitive position against hydrogen isn’t as clear for this.
Thanks Darren. The Hydrogen Ladder was intended to puncture a bunch of nonsense - it was in a sense destructive. The Hydrogen Staircase is creative - it demonstrates what you can do, not what you can't, which is always harder.
Not just that, like the hydrogen ladder, it ranks by economics. But it actually puts a timeline on the stair case as well which sorts use cases from already the most economical way to do things right now all the way to commercialization likely starting from the 2040s. That might need adjusting but it is a bit of a wake up call for people that assume some of these things are further away than they might actually be.
As a discussion piece, the genius with this is that it is hard to argue with things that people are already using at scale. Somebody going "it will never works for trucks" you can just point at this and tell them to just wait 5-10 years in your part of the world because this is already happening elsewhere right now.
Another perspective here might be technical readiness levels as an alternate view on these use cases. Most of these are well beyond the proof of concept phase already. The bottom half of the staircase is commercial use and scaling happening right now. The top half is not yet there but getting closer.
A lot of discussion about solutions in this space become a lot clearer if you clarify where things are on this scale.
I don't like Technical Readiness Levels. At EcoPragma Capital we use our own scale of Commercial Readiness Level to evaluate opportunities, which includes things like whether there is revenue, and whether it is fully commercial or just from grants and pilots, is there a sales and service organisation in place, has pricing been decided and proven to work, etc. TRLs are often assessed by technical people who are a million miles from having actually sold products into the market. Particularly where solutions need to be bankable in order to scale, they can be very misleading.
Sounds like a good approach. TRLs are better than nothing. I notice a lot of people create a lot of noise around things that are clearly barely working or tested as if they will disrupt the market next year already.
With the stair case, what interests me is the beyond 2040 perspective. That's a lot less certain of course but there are some potentially very disruptive things that could become possible.
You could imagine a similar ladder/staircase for electricity generation and storage technologies. Batteries, fusion, nuclear, solid state, etc. have a lot of probable innovations that could be coming to market soon or in a few decades.
I agree, there are some big potential disruptors by 2040. I would add AI and quantum computing to your list, along with carbon nano-tube or superconducting power lines.
I suspect that fission by then will look like a few dozen more GW-scale plants doing their thing, plus maybe a hundred SMRs doing ± nothing at climate scale. I’m guessing fusion will be a dozen or so trial plants running for a few days or weeks at a time, proving unreliable and expensive, plus lots of science experiments turning cash into press releases.
Great work. The size of the steps could reflect the size of the emissions: trabsport, heating: large blocks, easy to get up. Aviatoon: difficilt, but tiny block
Reiner, governments developed and pushed into the market practically the entire technology stack behind telecoms, aviation, space, and medicine. Almost all of the transport and energy infrastructure that we all use was built by or planned by governments. Without government regulation, the aviation, transport, telecoms and financial system ceases to operate. Even fracking and AI arose out of research funded for decades by governments. The idea that, of all the industries in the world, only clean energy has to make its way with no supportive actions from government is not a smart statement, it reveals a powerful incumbency bias towards fossil fuels.
I’ll second that agricultural machinery might be worthy of breaking out into its own category. It’s a huge sector, and farming can carry big political weight. Tractors are starting to happen, but understanding how far along we are to achieving electric combine harvesters for example could be a useful item for policy makers. Or do they stay with liquid fuels like bio diesel?
very informative! Well done. It would be useful to complement with rough estimates of other parameters that go with the steps, like potential ghg reduction or some energy measurement like useful or final. “Just step one takes us this far…”
Thanks! Feel free to produce further versions with additional data fields - that’s why we released it under the Creative Commons licence. We will publicise the best variants.
Great ladder and certainly a useful framing to get Australian policy and investment better prioritised.
I assume that agriculture is included in the non-road mobile machinery. I would suggest this be made a separate category at either the same level, or perhaps in early trial at the next tier. Ag production as an industry is more conservative and while open to change, the assets they have and use patterns may lend themselves to separate category. Change here (like perhaps many other sectors), will be as much behavioural and capital related than whether it can be technically, or even techno-economically achieved.
Great work! There are however two points where "electrify everything" is questionable. First steel, where the two Swedish projects Hybrit and Stegra are advancing with (electric) hydrogen reduction rather than molten oxide electrolysis. They will do it in the next few years, rather than decades.
The other is cement. Alternative binders, such as volcanic material, calcinated clay and other stuff can cut emissions fast and much. They are already doing it. Electric cement with CCS may not be feasible at all, at least not soon and at an acceptable cost.
OK, but primary steel (meaning molten oxide electrolysis) and electric clinker are on your ladder, both a long way into the future .
Hydrogen steel will come sooner than MOE. Several supplementary binders are here now. Heidelberg uses volcanic cement from Iceland, everybody uses slag and ash. Calcinated clay is used by Heidelberg, Aalborg Portland and others. Cement and primary are often described as "hard-to-abate" and in need of CCS, though faster, simpler and cheaper solutions are at hand.
Steel and cement represent perhaps 15 percent of global carbon emissions and a large part of what is left when power, heat and transport is electrified.
Electricification remains the big thing, and the ladder is a great tool.
Some hydrogen steel will come before directly electrified primary steel. Whether it will become widespread, and whether it will maintain its lead over direct electrification remains to be seen. I would be a lot less confident than you.
In the UK, with its solar pv capacity factor of 11%, for every (intermittent) TWh of electricity generated, 70X more copper is used than a TWh of (24/7/365) electricity from a Gen III+ nuclear power plant (NPP), be they Large Reactors or small modular reactors (SMRs).
For intermittent offshore wind, the figure is 67X; for intermittent, environmental and ecosystem destructive onshore wind, it's 26X. Add to that the copper used in the Rube Goldberg technologies (including BESSs) renewables supporters call upon for when the wind don't blow (often) and the Sun don't shine (every day) and 'a pipedream' is not hyperbole.
The era of SMRs is already underway with the advanced build of the first of 4 GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy BWRX-300 SMRs to come on line in 2030 at OPG's Darlington site. Rolls-Royce SMR Ltd. will build 3 of their 470 MW SMRs at the Wylfa site in the UK. Both companies have dozens of potential orders in the pipeline in North America and several European nations.
Without doubt, exponential growth of SMR technologies is now underway as the only pragmatic and economical way to decarbonise electricity generation.
But what about decarbonising all other sectors of energy use like all forms of transport and industrial processes? It won't be too long, as renewables wither and die, that worldwide decision makers realise greener-than-green, nuclear enabled hydrogen (NEH) uniquely answers that question:
By using the heat property of nuclear power, SOEC electrolysers in combination with Gen III+ NPPs can manufacture NEH at a 40% higher production rate than wind and solar are able to do by 'cold' electrolysis.
In nuclear-ready nations, it can save $billions every year and millions of premature deaths/vile illnesses by eliminating the 'evils' of the burning of fossil fuels:
Gen III+ NPPs and NEH can decarbonise nearly all sectors of energy use whilst virtually eliminating the need for energy storage, which is the Achilles Heel of renewables. It is the Occam's Razor solution to a cleaner world free of fossil fuel pollution (including GHGs) at minimal 'cost'.
Minimal investment
Minimal environmental impact
Minimal mineral/energy/material/manufacturing use
Minimal seabed and land area use
Minimal ecosystem destruction
Minimal biodiversity loss
Here's hoping, very soon, that all nuclear power advocates across all media/social media platforms start to recognise Gen III+ NPPs combined with SOEC electrolysers answers all the questions and 'WE' should be 'selling it as the Silver Bullet package.
Blah blah blah. Meanwhile 90% of power generation capacity being added to the grid is wind and solar, and one car in four being sold worldwide is an EV, and shock horror, we still seem to have enough copper - which by the way can also be substituted by aluminium in many use cases, which can be substituted by magnesium, etc, etc. Yes, we need lots of minerals and metals, but people have been forecasting that we will run out of those for hundreds of years, probably longer. Humans are clever and resourceful. Although some prefer to sit on the sidelines and carp.
I guess we will see what the market decides for. With the current speed the world adds the equivalent of the global nuclear fleet in electricity generation (not capacity!) of solar every 3.5 years.
Would a step zero/ground level category be useful for use cases where electricity use is common and alternative fuels or processes are competitive but not decisively so? Gas ovens seem to be pretty rare these days and almost all metro systems are electrified as is most suburban rail. I would have thought secondary steel would be in this category as arc furnace technology is widespread. This would show where the lowest of low hanging fruit is as the technology is mature, markets are established and a supporting infrastructure and business ecosystem is in place globally if not locally.
Electric road vehicles would remain in Step A for now while charging infrastructure is rolled out, battery prices find their level, and EVs remain second to ICE vehicles in numbers manufactured and sold in nearly all markets.
I would put all domestic use cases where gas is an option in Step 0. Domestic electrical resistance space heating, water heating and cooking are century old technologies and widely used, especially where electricity is cheaper or gas wasn't piped in. Heat pumps and induction cook tops could be seperated out and put in A or B.
All rail transport could move to Step 0 if regional and remote rail is made a separate category for cases where battery locomotives are needed.
Here in WA, remote iron ore mines are starting to replace the diesel locomotives for battery electric but are still used in conjunction with diesels, so I would place this category in step C or D.
Pilbara iron ore rail is an interesting case and may be too unusual to be an example here. There are four separate, overlaping private rail networks owned by competing mining companies (in one case, three networks run lines down the same corridor). There are large distances involved. There are no major urban or industrial centres nearby or even connected to the networks to support the growth of new industries. The ore trains are the longest trains in the world requiring for locomotives each. And The Pilbara is a remote region in a remote state in a remote country. The cost of electrifying the networks would be prohibitive even if they were consolidated. Not to mention the fact that private interests avoid spending on infrastucture where returns can be delayed by years.
People have made proposals for electrification for years, even before the battery age, afterseeing resistant radiators on the diesel locomotives glow red at night while dumping power. The decent to the coast of a mega tonne ore train from 700m elevation could send enough power down overhead wires to power whole mining towns. When batteries became a thing, the idea was to charge up on the way down and get a free ride for the empty train's return trip.
Diesel supply is relatively cheap and secure when you are a global resource company controlling vast logistic chains. Accoringly, it is only second tier companies, namely Hamersley Iron and Fortescue, who are starting to electrify their rolling stock while the the super giants, Rio Tinto and BHP, are hardly even bothering to adopt mine site solar power in this sunniest of regions. Involvement in the nearby gas industry might also have something to do with it.
For a lot of the cases where battery electric rail might work it would be as likely that overhead or third rail electrification would be an option until reducing battery cost and rising diesel prices make battery trains more competitive against both wired electric and diesel.
I love the idea of a Step Zero for things that used not to be electric but now are. Lawnmowers, hedge-trimmers, cameras… if you go far enough back to the beginning of my career, even calculators!
Thank you, I found the value in the hydrogen ladder to be in disabusing the notion that hydrogen could be anything, and soon. This is a good first step, but the competitive position against hydrogen isn’t as clear for this.
Thanks Darren. The Hydrogen Ladder was intended to puncture a bunch of nonsense - it was in a sense destructive. The Hydrogen Staircase is creative - it demonstrates what you can do, not what you can't, which is always harder.
Not just that, like the hydrogen ladder, it ranks by economics. But it actually puts a timeline on the stair case as well which sorts use cases from already the most economical way to do things right now all the way to commercialization likely starting from the 2040s. That might need adjusting but it is a bit of a wake up call for people that assume some of these things are further away than they might actually be.
As a discussion piece, the genius with this is that it is hard to argue with things that people are already using at scale. Somebody going "it will never works for trucks" you can just point at this and tell them to just wait 5-10 years in your part of the world because this is already happening elsewhere right now.
Another perspective here might be technical readiness levels as an alternate view on these use cases. Most of these are well beyond the proof of concept phase already. The bottom half of the staircase is commercial use and scaling happening right now. The top half is not yet there but getting closer.
A lot of discussion about solutions in this space become a lot clearer if you clarify where things are on this scale.
I don't like Technical Readiness Levels. At EcoPragma Capital we use our own scale of Commercial Readiness Level to evaluate opportunities, which includes things like whether there is revenue, and whether it is fully commercial or just from grants and pilots, is there a sales and service organisation in place, has pricing been decided and proven to work, etc. TRLs are often assessed by technical people who are a million miles from having actually sold products into the market. Particularly where solutions need to be bankable in order to scale, they can be very misleading.
Sounds like a good approach. TRLs are better than nothing. I notice a lot of people create a lot of noise around things that are clearly barely working or tested as if they will disrupt the market next year already.
With the stair case, what interests me is the beyond 2040 perspective. That's a lot less certain of course but there are some potentially very disruptive things that could become possible.
You could imagine a similar ladder/staircase for electricity generation and storage technologies. Batteries, fusion, nuclear, solid state, etc. have a lot of probable innovations that could be coming to market soon or in a few decades.
I agree, there are some big potential disruptors by 2040. I would add AI and quantum computing to your list, along with carbon nano-tube or superconducting power lines.
I suspect that fission by then will look like a few dozen more GW-scale plants doing their thing, plus maybe a hundred SMRs doing ± nothing at climate scale. I’m guessing fusion will be a dozen or so trial plants running for a few days or weeks at a time, proving unreliable and expensive, plus lots of science experiments turning cash into press releases.
Let’s reconvene in 14 years and see if I’m right.
A typo in the second sentence: ".....Electrification Staircase......"
Great work. The size of the steps could reflect the size of the emissions: trabsport, heating: large blocks, easy to get up. Aviatoon: difficilt, but tiny block
Thanks! Feel free to publish your own version with any additional data - that’s the value of the Creative Commons license.
Thank you for your work and the new ladder. Very unsefull and nice as your hydrogen ladder!
If these steps are affordable, great. Let the market decide. We don’t need government mandates and subsidies to push expensive options.
Reiner, governments developed and pushed into the market practically the entire technology stack behind telecoms, aviation, space, and medicine. Almost all of the transport and energy infrastructure that we all use was built by or planned by governments. Without government regulation, the aviation, transport, telecoms and financial system ceases to operate. Even fracking and AI arose out of research funded for decades by governments. The idea that, of all the industries in the world, only clean energy has to make its way with no supportive actions from government is not a smart statement, it reveals a powerful incumbency bias towards fossil fuels.
Power grids don’t work without dispatchable generation no matter what some government energy agencies want to believe and impose.
I’ll second that agricultural machinery might be worthy of breaking out into its own category. It’s a huge sector, and farming can carry big political weight. Tractors are starting to happen, but understanding how far along we are to achieving electric combine harvesters for example could be a useful item for policy makers. Or do they stay with liquid fuels like bio diesel?
very informative! Well done. It would be useful to complement with rough estimates of other parameters that go with the steps, like potential ghg reduction or some energy measurement like useful or final. “Just step one takes us this far…”
Thanks! Feel free to produce further versions with additional data fields - that’s why we released it under the Creative Commons licence. We will publicise the best variants.
Great ladder and certainly a useful framing to get Australian policy and investment better prioritised.
I assume that agriculture is included in the non-road mobile machinery. I would suggest this be made a separate category at either the same level, or perhaps in early trial at the next tier. Ag production as an industry is more conservative and while open to change, the assets they have and use patterns may lend themselves to separate category. Change here (like perhaps many other sectors), will be as much behavioural and capital related than whether it can be technically, or even techno-economically achieved.
Yes, we might need to separate out mining and construction machinery from agricultural machinery for Version 2.0
Great work! There are however two points where "electrify everything" is questionable. First steel, where the two Swedish projects Hybrit and Stegra are advancing with (electric) hydrogen reduction rather than molten oxide electrolysis. They will do it in the next few years, rather than decades.
The other is cement. Alternative binders, such as volcanic material, calcinated clay and other stuff can cut emissions fast and much. They are already doing it. Electric cement with CCS may not be feasible at all, at least not soon and at an acceptable cost.
Who’s talking about Electrify Everything? Read tagline of the piece.
OK, but primary steel (meaning molten oxide electrolysis) and electric clinker are on your ladder, both a long way into the future .
Hydrogen steel will come sooner than MOE. Several supplementary binders are here now. Heidelberg uses volcanic cement from Iceland, everybody uses slag and ash. Calcinated clay is used by Heidelberg, Aalborg Portland and others. Cement and primary are often described as "hard-to-abate" and in need of CCS, though faster, simpler and cheaper solutions are at hand.
Steel and cement represent perhaps 15 percent of global carbon emissions and a large part of what is left when power, heat and transport is electrified.
Electricification remains the big thing, and the ladder is a great tool.
Some hydrogen steel will come before directly electrified primary steel. Whether it will become widespread, and whether it will maintain its lead over direct electrification remains to be seen. I would be a lot less confident than you.
Hello Michael, the link to the electrification staircase image is broken? https://www.watts-next.eu/app/uploads/07b50d4f71ed1ece03c6cbac-electrification-staircase.png
Could you replace it with a working one?
Chemical process heat that high??
But it needs cheap dispatchable energy.
A total and utter pipedream for technologies that use copper inefficiently when compared to competitive technologies that minimise the use of copper.
Wind/solar/BESSs/EVs and EV charging will all die lingering deaths at the hands of the Copper-Crunch which is already underway:
https://substack.com/@colinmegson/p-178194459
In the UK, with its solar pv capacity factor of 11%, for every (intermittent) TWh of electricity generated, 70X more copper is used than a TWh of (24/7/365) electricity from a Gen III+ nuclear power plant (NPP), be they Large Reactors or small modular reactors (SMRs).
For intermittent offshore wind, the figure is 67X; for intermittent, environmental and ecosystem destructive onshore wind, it's 26X. Add to that the copper used in the Rube Goldberg technologies (including BESSs) renewables supporters call upon for when the wind don't blow (often) and the Sun don't shine (every day) and 'a pipedream' is not hyperbole.
The era of SMRs is already underway with the advanced build of the first of 4 GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy BWRX-300 SMRs to come on line in 2030 at OPG's Darlington site. Rolls-Royce SMR Ltd. will build 3 of their 470 MW SMRs at the Wylfa site in the UK. Both companies have dozens of potential orders in the pipeline in North America and several European nations.
Without doubt, exponential growth of SMR technologies is now underway as the only pragmatic and economical way to decarbonise electricity generation.
But what about decarbonising all other sectors of energy use like all forms of transport and industrial processes? It won't be too long, as renewables wither and die, that worldwide decision makers realise greener-than-green, nuclear enabled hydrogen (NEH) uniquely answers that question:
https://substack.com/@colinmegson/p-121228909
By using the heat property of nuclear power, SOEC electrolysers in combination with Gen III+ NPPs can manufacture NEH at a 40% higher production rate than wind and solar are able to do by 'cold' electrolysis.
In nuclear-ready nations, it can save $billions every year and millions of premature deaths/vile illnesses by eliminating the 'evils' of the burning of fossil fuels:
https://substack.com/@colinmegson/p-146111400
Gen III+ NPPs and NEH can decarbonise nearly all sectors of energy use whilst virtually eliminating the need for energy storage, which is the Achilles Heel of renewables. It is the Occam's Razor solution to a cleaner world free of fossil fuel pollution (including GHGs) at minimal 'cost'.
Minimal investment
Minimal environmental impact
Minimal mineral/energy/material/manufacturing use
Minimal seabed and land area use
Minimal ecosystem destruction
Minimal biodiversity loss
Here's hoping, very soon, that all nuclear power advocates across all media/social media platforms start to recognise Gen III+ NPPs combined with SOEC electrolysers answers all the questions and 'WE' should be 'selling it as the Silver Bullet package.
Blah blah blah. Meanwhile 90% of power generation capacity being added to the grid is wind and solar, and one car in four being sold worldwide is an EV, and shock horror, we still seem to have enough copper - which by the way can also be substituted by aluminium in many use cases, which can be substituted by magnesium, etc, etc. Yes, we need lots of minerals and metals, but people have been forecasting that we will run out of those for hundreds of years, probably longer. Humans are clever and resourceful. Although some prefer to sit on the sidelines and carp.
Don’t you just love the blah, blah, blah of percentages being added for wind and solar @Michael Liebreich
In 1993, ’Wind, solar and other renewables’ were at 0.454% of Total Energy use. By 2023, they were at 3.274%
Can you now calculate how long it will take for ’Wind, solar and other renewables’ to supply 100% of the world’s energy use🤔
Hints: (a) You won’t be around to see it (b) It’s over 1,000 years.
Search for: iea Energy Statistics Data Browser
I wouldn't bet on a copper shortage killing renewables as copper can be replaced with aluminium in most applications.
https://www.shapesbyhydro.com/en/knowledge/how-we-can-substitute-aluminium-for-copper-in-the-green-transition/
I guess we will see what the market decides for. With the current speed the world adds the equivalent of the global nuclear fleet in electricity generation (not capacity!) of solar every 3.5 years.
Would a step zero/ground level category be useful for use cases where electricity use is common and alternative fuels or processes are competitive but not decisively so? Gas ovens seem to be pretty rare these days and almost all metro systems are electrified as is most suburban rail. I would have thought secondary steel would be in this category as arc furnace technology is widespread. This would show where the lowest of low hanging fruit is as the technology is mature, markets are established and a supporting infrastructure and business ecosystem is in place globally if not locally.
Electric road vehicles would remain in Step A for now while charging infrastructure is rolled out, battery prices find their level, and EVs remain second to ICE vehicles in numbers manufactured and sold in nearly all markets.
I would put all domestic use cases where gas is an option in Step 0. Domestic electrical resistance space heating, water heating and cooking are century old technologies and widely used, especially where electricity is cheaper or gas wasn't piped in. Heat pumps and induction cook tops could be seperated out and put in A or B.
All rail transport could move to Step 0 if regional and remote rail is made a separate category for cases where battery locomotives are needed.
Here in WA, remote iron ore mines are starting to replace the diesel locomotives for battery electric but are still used in conjunction with diesels, so I would place this category in step C or D.
Pilbara iron ore rail is an interesting case and may be too unusual to be an example here. There are four separate, overlaping private rail networks owned by competing mining companies (in one case, three networks run lines down the same corridor). There are large distances involved. There are no major urban or industrial centres nearby or even connected to the networks to support the growth of new industries. The ore trains are the longest trains in the world requiring for locomotives each. And The Pilbara is a remote region in a remote state in a remote country. The cost of electrifying the networks would be prohibitive even if they were consolidated. Not to mention the fact that private interests avoid spending on infrastucture where returns can be delayed by years.
People have made proposals for electrification for years, even before the battery age, afterseeing resistant radiators on the diesel locomotives glow red at night while dumping power. The decent to the coast of a mega tonne ore train from 700m elevation could send enough power down overhead wires to power whole mining towns. When batteries became a thing, the idea was to charge up on the way down and get a free ride for the empty train's return trip.
Diesel supply is relatively cheap and secure when you are a global resource company controlling vast logistic chains. Accoringly, it is only second tier companies, namely Hamersley Iron and Fortescue, who are starting to electrify their rolling stock while the the super giants, Rio Tinto and BHP, are hardly even bothering to adopt mine site solar power in this sunniest of regions. Involvement in the nearby gas industry might also have something to do with it.
For a lot of the cases where battery electric rail might work it would be as likely that overhead or third rail electrification would be an option until reducing battery cost and rising diesel prices make battery trains more competitive against both wired electric and diesel.
I love the idea of a Step Zero for things that used not to be electric but now are. Lawnmowers, hedge-trimmers, cameras… if you go far enough back to the beginning of my career, even calculators!