The Electrification Staircase is go!

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.

The Electrification Staircase 1.0. Image: Electrification Alliance - but don’t worry, check the small print, feel free to download it and use it, that’s the whole point.

Background

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all roads to a future of clean, affordable, resilient and abundant energy must run through the valley of deep electrification.

So it’s quite a relief after five years of hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen, that the word on everyone’s lips around the world is now electrification. Once you get reasonably clean power, electrification represents the cheapest way to deliver incremental decarbonization. And electrification is the only real way to insulate yourself from the current oil and gas shock - and the next one, and the one after, ad infinitum. China gets it. Consumers flocking to buy EVs get it.

Despite this, it will not always be an easy road. Some things you can electrify right now and save money. For others, the technology exists, journalists and activists make it sound easy, but it’s not ready for prime time. What is a busy minister, investor or executive to think?

That’s where the Electrification Staircase comes in - and it is the subject of this week’s episode of Cleaning Up. It’s panel discussion with the team that created it, recorded a few weeks back in front of a live audience at a Leadership Circle breakfast in Brussels.

History and rationale

The Staircase came about from a conversation between me and Adrian Hiel, they guy whose Twitter post gave me the idea and format for the Hydrogen Ladder. Adrian was taking up a new role as director of the Electrification Alliance, and we joked about the need for an Electrification Ladder. It took me 10 minutes to make one for him by flipping the hydrogen ladder:

But it wasn’t good enough. It didn’t cover the use cases in enough granularity. It missed use cases irrelevant for hydrogen but relevant for electrification. And it didn’t include a time dimension. The Hydrogen Ladder answers the question “what will we and what won’t we be doing, once the transients die away by around 2035”. The question the Electrification Staircase tries to answer is “What should we rolling out right now at speed, versus treating like a pilot or a trial for commercialisation in coming decades”.

Adrian and I reached out to some folks with much better knowledge than us. Dr Silvia Madeddu, whose seminal paper on the potential for electrification in industry was such an eye-opener for me (check out her 2022 appearance on Cleaning Up); Thomas Butler, associate at the Regulatory Assistance Project, whose Linkedin profile modestly says he is “particularly interested in the electrification of heat in light and heavy industry”;’ and my Liebreich Associates / EcoPragma Capital / PragmaCharge colleague, William Drake, who has spent over five years diving deep into the physics and economics of transport electrification.

As with the Hydrogen Ladder, our aim was to provide a simple graphic to enable better conversations between stakeholders. To provide a shared vocabulary for investors, policymakers, executives, technologists. To break the tyranny of polarization: electrify everything versus electrify nothing; electrify immediately versus electrify laster; electrify cars but not trucks; electrify new build but not old.

We called it a Staircase to communicate the time dimension. You don’t have to do everything at once, just start on step one and keep going. A few folks have told us it should be called an escalator - well, maybe we’ll rename it once the world gets to 50% electrification!

Download and use it

The Electrification Staircase is intended to be used. We published it, like the Hydrogen Ladder, under a Creative Commons license. Download it. Use it in your reports. All we ask is that you you attribute it correctly.

You can even change it, if you want. We are quite happy for you to disagree with it. It would be weird if we got it 100% right on our first go. Just let us know why you disagree, we’ll engage and listen. If we think you’re right, we’ll update it and issue Version 2.0 in due course.

Above all, have fun, and talk to each other about it!