00:04
Dave Anderson
Well, welcome back to the Solar Podcast. I'm Dave Anderson, your host. I'm thrilled to have with me today Mark Jacobson. So Mark is actually a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. For the last 25 years, he's focused his research on developing large scale clean renewable energy. He's a very prolific author. I've had the opportunity to listen to him speak on many podcasts as well as other platforms. I've also studied some of the things that he's researched and written. I'm absolutely thrilled to have him on the podcast today. Mark, I'd love if you wouldn't mind just giving our listeners a little bit about who you are, but I do have to mention in part of your bio and I'm sure it'll come up, but this is something that's really been a passion and a lifelong project for you. This isn't something that you're doing as a profession and I have a lot of respect for you for that.
00:45
Dave Anderson
But Mark, please welcome to the podcast. I'd love for you to give our listeners a little bit more of an intro and a little bit more of an understanding about who you are.
00:52
Mark Jacobson
Yes, thank you Dave, for having me on. So I study air pollution, climate, and the problems associated with them and also clean renewable energy solutions to those problems. And so I've been very passionate about trying to understand and solve large scale pollution and climate problems ever since I was a teenager and dedicated my career toward that goal. And so when I started at Stanford, I was doing computer modeling of air pollution and climate primarily. And then a few years later, I started looking at clean renewable energy solutions to those problems. And starting in about 2009, I began developing energy plans for, well, first the world as a whole, but then individual US states, and then countries and individual cities and towns and how to transition entirely to clean renewable energy, namely wind, water and solar power and electrification of everything. That's basically where I am now.
01:48
Mark Jacobson
And still looking at those problems, still looking at the underlying problems and the solutions.
01:54
Dave Anderson
We're definitely going to want to spend some time talking about your most recent book. I believe it's your most recent book, unless you have it a publication that's come out since 2002, but no miracles needed. But you've written several books on the subject over the years. And listeners to the podcast know that I grew up in a coal mining town in western or excuse me, in eastern Montana. And they talked about how clean the coal plant was and you could see the smokestacks emanating the steam and the smoke and the pollution and whatnot coming from the stacks. And there was always a positive propaganda campaign that was going on at the schools because we lived under the shadows of this gigantic coal fired power plant. And they'd always talk about taking the pollutants out of the air and never really talked about decarbonization at all.
02:36
Dave Anderson
That wasn't part of the conversation at all. So I'm curious. Over the 25 years that you've been writing these books and actually from the time that when you were 13 years old, when you really started talking about removing pollution, what are the things where the biggest changes in terms of the way that you sort of think about air quality and in terms of how you think about removing pollution and how you sort of think about solving these big existential problems.
03:02
Mark Jacobson
Well, what I've learned is that there is no way to remove pollution or to eliminate it from a smokestack. The only way is to change the actual source of energy or the source of the process. Because no matter how many filters you put on something, you're always allowing some pollution to go through those filters. That cold fire, power plant exhaust that kind of looks clean, really contains a lot of invisible particles and gases. Oxides of nitrogen, oxides of hydrogen, organic gases, small particulate matter, and things like mercury. These are all you can't see. And just because you can't see them doesn't mean that they're not there. In fact, most dangerous particles, all particles cause health effects, even at the very lowest level, is close to zero. And the most dangerous particles are the smallest ones that you can't see. They penetrate deepest into your lungs.
03:59
Mark Jacobson
And so, no matter, you know, regardless of the fact that we've had filters around and some kind of scrubbers for coal plants ever since about 1860s, there's still pollution coming out of these coal plants. And similarly, you can't take all the carbon dioxide out of a coal plant either. And even when you do, it takes a lot of energy. And where does that energy come from? And when I say it takes energy, it takes a lot of energy. In the case of a coal plant, if you try to add a carbon capture equipment to it, up to 30% of the electricity of the coal plant has to go toward running that carbon capture equipment. So it takes a lot of energy. And so that basically means you might need to, if you're going to get that from the coal, the energy from the coal, you're going to have to mine 30% more coal.
04:48
Mark Jacobson
You have 30% more air pollution. There's no free lunch. Even if you use wind energy or solar energy to power that carbon capture equipment, you're preventing that wind or solar from actually replacing the coal plant, in which case it would actually reduce more carbon dioxide and also eliminate the air pollution and the mining of the coal and the coal infrastructure. So using energy to try to scrub carbon from coal or any other source is actually an opportunity cost. That increases carbon dioxide, it increases mining, it increases air pollution, it increases fossil fuel infrastructure. It's not a solution to anything.
05:28
Dave Anderson
Yeah, over the years, this idea of clean energy has taken a handful of different names. So, like when I was a kid, we talked about greenhouse gas or ozone and then more recently we talked about global warming and then it's kind of switched to climate change and then climate catastrophe, these different names. Has there been an evolution in our learning in terms of understanding the impact and do you feel like we have a good understanding today about really understanding what the equation looks like in terms of the net effect of either carbon or other sorts of pollutions? And obviously we and all the listeners on this show tend to be pretty strong advocates of all things renewable energy. But I'd love to get your take just in terms of the evolution from a research perspective about our understanding of the impact of the non renewable energy sources that we've sort of relied on over the decades.
06:24
Mark Jacobson
Well, I think we've known for centuries about the air pollution impacts of combustion fuels, whether they're biofuels or fossil fuels. I mean, air pollution results from combustion. And worldwide today over seven people die every year from air pollution and most of 90% of it is from energy, either fossil fuels or biofuels. But we've known about air pollution impacts for a long time. Things that we've learned in the last 30 years are the details, what are some of the specific health effects? What are some of the feedbacks that go on in the atmosphere? How do air pollutants feed back to climate? How do air pollutants feed back to each other to affect their own concentrations? How do air pollutants feed back to meteorology? These are all details that are really interesting from a scientific perspective. But the most important thing that the public really wants to know, needs to know is the health effects and what quantifying the health effects.
07:31
Mark Jacobson
And so to that extent we've known that we've known there are lots of health effects for a long time. We're just now distilling what are this more specific health effects of air pollutes in terms of climate. We've also known for at least since Arrhenius back in around 1895, where he hypothesized that doubling or coal burning since the Industrial Revolution started had the potential to raise earth's temperature quite a bit due to the greenhouse effect, well enhanced the greenhouse effect due to humans, which is called global warming. So we've known about that and again, it's in the 120 plus years since Iranius, his first discovery. We've refined the number. The actual concept hasn't changed. So we have enough information and we've had enough information for a long time to know that we have to solve emissions, we have to eliminate emissions, affect both air pollution and climate.
08:36
Mark Jacobson
And many of the same emissions, almost most of the same emissions that affect air pollution also affect climate and vice versa. Although there are some emissions that are not from energy that affect climate, such as methane emissions due to from agriculture and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture halogens, which are often used as coolants, and also, well, biomass burning, which is an air pollution problem, but it's not an energy related air pollution problem and also affects as well. Yeah, we've learned a lot, but we should have been solving this problem a long time. Yeah, absolutely.
09:19
Dave Anderson
I love the nonsense title to your book, no Miracles Needed. Right? And we're definitely going to want to talk about that. But one of the biggest critiques against renewable energy is this idea that, well, what are we going to we can't just stop burning fuel for our vehicles. We're reliant on coal. And there's so many anecdotes that get thrown around to sort of like try to spoil the party for solar, wind and water, these other renewable energy sources that have proven to be very reliable over time. As you sort of talk about that, how does the book sort of frame for the reader? And I think, by the way, it does it in a really simple way, but maybe you can kind of help our listeners understand how the book sort of frames in a simple way how these problems and these transitions maybe aren't as big as what some people are making them out to be.
10:08
Mark Jacobson
Well, I point out in a book that we have 95% of the technologies that we need, and even the ones we don't have, we know how to do, we just haven't commercialized them. And those include like, long distance aircraft, long distance ships, some industrial processes. But for the most part, the solution is very simple. We electrify as much as possible and we provide that electricity with clean renewable energy. So there are four major sectors, energy sectors, there's electricity, transportation, buildings and industry for electricity. Well, so we want to electrify then to provide pretty much all the energy from electricity. So transportation we'd go to battery electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles for large long distance transport. And in those cases, the electricity for batteries and the electricity and hydrogen fuel cells, the hydrogen will be produced from electricity as well. So no what's called blue hydrogen or brown hydrogen or gray hydrogen or any other color, just green hydrogen, which is from electricity.
11:11
Mark Jacobson
In both cases, the electricity would come from just wind, water and solar power. And so that includes onshore and offshore wind, solar photovoltaics on rooftops and in power plants, concentrated solar power, geothermals, part of the water, geothermal, electricity and heat, solar heat as well, and then hydroelectricity in small amounts of time for buildings. Electrify those we'd get rid of gas heaters, oil based heaters for air heating and water heating, we'd go entirely to electric heat pumps for air conditioning, electric heat pumps, clothes drying, electric heat pumps for cooking, electric induction cooktops. So anything that where you're burning gas or other fuels in your home, we would electrify that. We go to Led lights, more energy efficient homes, more weatherizing homes so they don't lose heats. So that takes care of buildings. And that's definitely possible. Since 2017, 100% renewable home, my roof batteries in my garage, heat pumps, electric induction.
12:18
Mark Jacobson
I haven't paid an electricity bill in six and a half years and paid a gasoline bill because I have electric cars that are charged for my solar on my roof. I haven't paid a natural gas bill because I have no natural gas in my home. So definitely possible. All new homes. It's straightforward and should be done retrofitting. Existing homes is also straightforward. Technically, of course, requires in the US, there's 100 million homes, and worldwide there's a lot more. And so it's a big project, but we are capable of doing that. We have the technology for industry. We need to electrify that industrial processes for all electricity and heat and industry, we'd go to renewable electricity and heat, but then we'd change out high temperature industrial processes. We'd use electric arc furnaces induction, furnaces resistance, furnaces dielectric heaters, electron beam heaters. These are all existing electric technologies to give us high temperatures.
13:15
Mark Jacobson
Also heat pumps, moderate temperature processes and even what about people ask, well, what about carbon dioxide from steel and cement production? Well, that's straightforward too. There's now a steel plant in Sweden that runs instead of using coke to reduce iron ore to pure iron, which releases CO2 carbon dioxide chemically, you can instead use hydrogen to convert iron ore to pure iron. And if you produce the hydrogen with green electricity, it's green hydrogen. And that whole problem. Then you use electric arc furnaces instead of blast furnaces. And when you do that, you reduce 98% plus of all CO2 emissions from steel. They actually have a plan in Sweden to convert all their steel factories to green hydrogen. And several countries in Europe are doing this as well. So there's a solution right there for cement. Similar problem right now, ordinary Portland cement, you have carbon dioxide emissions from the release of carbon dioxide from calcium carbonate because calcium is in the cement.
14:27
Mark Jacobson
But that's because they use limestone. So now there's a company that instead of using limestone, uses basalt. And basalt has no carbonate in it, but it does have calcium. So you can get the basalt is actually more common, is more widespread than limestone. And so when you use basalt, you eliminate the process emissions, the chemical emissions of carbon dioxide. And again, if you use renewable electricity and heat for the rest of it, you can eliminate carbon dioxide from cement. There's also geopolymer cement, which has been doing this for years. It's another type of cement. There's an airport in Brisbane, Australia, that's built with 70,000 tons of geopolymer cement. No CO2 emissions need to be associated with that. If you use renewable electricity and heat to provide electricity and heat so we can transition all these sectors and then provide the electricity and heat with wind, water and solar for all purposes.
15:25
Mark Jacobson
So that's how you solve the problem.
15:27
Dave Anderson
So I know you've done extensive research on all these things, and it seems like you have all the answers, which is great. Yet there still seem to be these major opponents to the transition to these clean and renewable energies. So I'd love to hear what are some of the compelling steel man arguments against this energy transition that you hear? And obviously, as an academic, you certainly try to make sure that your thoughts hold up to scrutiny. What are some of the sort of like Steel Man arguments against this energy transition that you hear about that you find either compelling or if you were to Steel Man this argument, how would you do it?
16:07
Mark Jacobson
Well, the ones I've heard, the most common one is, well, the grid won't stay stable with wind and solar. This is a fallacy. It's not proven because, first of all, we're using not only renewable electricity, wind and solar are intermittent or variable, really. But I should point out that all energy sources are intermittent because like, a nuclear plant which provides when it's on, is providing constant power. Well, first of all, it's off on the order of 10% of the year in France. It was off last year. In 2022, all the nuclear plants in France were actually down 48% of the hours of the entire year. Wow. Capacity factor of 52%. And there was an offshore wind farm that's been running five years that's had a capacity factor of 54%. So there's an onshore wind farm, offshore windshield farm that was for five years was more reliable than the entire French nuclear fleet in 2022.
17:13
Mark Jacobson
But my point is not I'm not saying that renewables still need storage and backup, but so does so do fossil fuels. Even in nuclear when it's nuclear or coal, when you're providing baseload power, flat power, that flat power does not meet demand. Demand varies intermittently, just wind and solar. So you always need some kind of backup or to meet the peaks in demand. So while you need probably more backup with wind and solar, we have lots of types of backup. First of all, hydroelectric power. There are over 150 countries of the world that have hydroelectric power. And that's like a big battery. You can use it either for baseload or for peaking power to fill in gaps of solar and wind demand. Geothermal is also based, but there are actually nine countries of the world that are 98.5% to 100% windwater solar in their electricity generation, and they're all dominated by hydro.
18:13
Mark Jacobson
And there are actually 40 countries that have over 50% wind, water and solar in their generation. So hydro can be used as backup already pumped. Hydro is another source, and batteries, of course, can be used to backup. But anyway, that's the biggest thing that people have complained about. Other things that people have heard are criticisms are, well, it'll take materials, minerals like lithium or batteries, we need a lot of batteries. If we places that don't have a lot of hydro will need batteries. Well, if we compare when we're looking at mining, we have to look at what we're going to be eliminating fossil fuels require continuous mining every hour of every day. For the fuel itself, you need to drill wells. For natural gas. You need to drill wells for oil, dig coal mines. And in fact, there's so much mining. I mean, there are 1.3 million active oil and gas wells in the United States.
19:17
Mark Jacobson
There are 3.2 million abandoned ones. There are millions of miles of pipelines to move around gas and oil. I mean, this fossil fuel industry occupies 1.3% of all US. Land area, and this is growing. And so when we look at the mining in that context, when we have wind and solar in particular, which would be over 90% of the energy solution, in combination, we eliminate entirely fuel mining. So, yeah, there's going to be some mining, additional mining for batteries, for lithium, for batteries and minerals, but we're talking about one 100th to one 1000, the annual mining that's currently going on. So this is a red herring. That's another red herring that people throw out. The latest criticism I heard, which pretty much should be considered a joke, although it's pretty serious because it's getting a lot of play, is like offshore wind turbines killing whales.
20:22
Mark Jacobson
And so there's because there have been whale deaths off the east coast of the United States, and it's being attributed by a lot of anti wind people to offshore wind turbines, except that they're forgetting that there are only six offshore wind turbines offshore in the entire United States. Not six farms, six wind turbines. It's kind of hard to prove that you're getting these tens of whale deaths due to six turbines that are located near an island. So this is complete nonsense. And the national oceanic and atmospheric administration has debunked this claim. So there's no relationship between offshore wind turbines or even investigating locations for offshore wind turbines and whale dents. But you can just see how groups are getting together who oppose renewable energy. The same thing happens with solar. You see people claiming solar panels will I've seen it, especially with concentrated solar. And then you get beams that will kill birds or something like that.
21:28
Mark Jacobson
Or you're going to damage tortoise habitat in the desert because you have some solar panels there. Which not to dismiss the biological concerns, but we have to consider that we have 7 million people die every year due to air pollution, and hundreds of millions of animals die from air pollution resulting from fossil fuels and biofuel combustion. And while renewables do cause some damage, I mean, certainly wind causes some bird deaths. The bird deaths, for example, from wind turbines are trivial in comparison with bird deaths due to buildings. I mean, the American bird Conservancy, for example, estimates about 500,000 to 800,000 birds die from wind turbines each year in the United States, but the same group suggests that 1 billion birds die every year from buildings and 3 billion die from cats. So it's a kind of things taken out of proportion that if we eliminate and a lot die from.
22:34
Mark Jacobson
Actually one study found, for example, that fossil fuels kill ten times the number of birds per unit energy, electricity generated than do wind turbines. And that's because of the air pollution, because of the fossil fuel infrastructure, because of the mining that invades their habitat. So everything has to be put in perspective. Nobody wants to add anything to the environment. But given that we do need to add some things to the environment, what is the best thing to add? And clean renewable energy sources such as wind, water, solar, electric appliances and machines. These are the cleanest and safest, not only air pollution point of view, but a climate point of view also water point of view and the land.
23:15
Dave Anderson
What do you think the biggest paradigm shifts that people are going to have to go through to realize that this is possible? And I'll give you maybe as an example. So on this podcast we've talked a fair bit about micro grids. We've talked a fair bit about the electrification of vehicles and the sort of like naysayers for electric vehicles. It's like for those that have driven electric vehicles and those that understand that industry realize that it's an inevitability and that it's actually a better experience and a bunch of other better. But another example is this idea of like we seem to be trying to hold on to this macro grid, this big grid, this distributed energy power, or this large grid system where there seems to be great opportunities for micro grids and there's actually just going to be it's a paradigm shift for a lot of people.
24:03
Mark Jacobson
But what are some of those big.
24:04
Dave Anderson
Paradigm shifts that you think that people need to sort of have or undergo to really realize that this is something that we can do, we can accomplish, we can do it in actually a short period of time. It doesn't have to take a long time.
24:17
Mark Jacobson
Well, I think actually experiencing such a system really is beneficial. I mean, driving an electric car, for example, once somebody drives electric car, often they never want to go back because of the better acceleration, safer actually. The fuel cost is so much lower than a gasoline car, less maintenance, and it's quieter. Everything about it is just like, why would you want to do anything else? The main problem with electric cars has historically been ranging that people get because they feel they can't go far. But that is being overcome now. That has been overcome. Now we have cars that can go 400 miles on a charge, but even those that go 300 miles, that's really good. Or 250 miles, that's good for 95% of people's. Needs. And also there are now charging stations. Tesla actually this week put up its 50,000 supercharger since 20 12 50,000 superchargers.
25:23
Mark Jacobson
And these are like fast chargers. These are not just like your trickle charge or even moderate charger. These are fast chargers where people can charge their vehicle within an hour. So that's reduced range anxiety quite a bit. But also living in a home or visiting a home that's all renewable. I mean, it's just very comfortable. And knowing facts about that, like you've just reduced costs. I mean, not paying a bill once you have an electrified home, for example, not having to pay a bill for the next 25 years in either electricity or gas or if you have electric vehicles, even vehicle bills, that is something that people will really once they realize that they'll want to change completely. But it's hard to reach so many people. I mean, you can reach a few people. But one thing that is driving a change right now is the costs of renewable energy have come down substantially.
26:28
Mark Jacobson
In particular, solar and wind costs are enormously, have dropped enormously and much less than a dollar a watt capital cost. Whereas something like nuclear there's a new nuclear plant that was just opened in Georgia and that cost was about $15.6 a watt. The capital cost there's $35 billion for 2.2 gigawatts $15.6 a watt versus new wind or solar is less than a dollar a watt. So low cost has resulted in many states growing wind and solar substantially. In fact, nine of the states with the most wind as a percentage of electricity electric power generation in the US are all states that don't actually have incentives aside from the federal tax credit or any policies to push it's because it's so cheap. Same with solar. Solar is growing like gangbusters, not only in the US. But throughout the world because it's inexpensive. And not only that, batteries are coming down in cost.
27:33
Mark Jacobson
The sell price of batteries this week dropped to below to around $98 a kilowatt hour, which is it had been there in 2021 but jumped up after that. But it's come down again and it seems going on definite downward spiral trend. Which is good, because if we can get battery cost down even more, then there's no stopping a combination of batteries with wind and solar and all electrification I've been talking about to transition the world to 100% clean renewable energy and storage.
28:08
Dave Anderson
Yeah, it's pretty easy to make the economic argument for any given homeowner. And I think that's what the residential solar industry tries to do when they're out knocking on doors or talking to people over the phone is to say, hey, look, here's your economic cost for transition. And the truth of the matter is that we're still seeing those costs higher than they need to be. The soft cost of solar in the United States remain really high. There's a lot of bureaucracy in red tape. Even though you've got fantastic tailwinds at the federal level, at the local level, we still sort of like fight an uphill battle to be able to get any given customer installed. We also see the form factor and the way that we're kitting and putting packages together for solar and for batteries. At the residential level, we're still seeing batteries in the kind of being deployed.
28:56
Dave Anderson
And we're seeing solar in California, the most expensive market in the country, or excuse me, most expensive market in the world for residential solar in the $4 range. So obviously there's huge improvements to be made there. But you can still make a very strong economic argument for any given homeowner to make the transition both for transportation as well as for the electrification of their home. And there are some fantastic incentives for things like heat pumps and other things now through the Inflation Reduction Act, I know that your research has done a lot of research on the global economic cost. I'd love if you could just talk to our listeners a little bit about what is both the global need and the global cost for transition to renewable energies. And I actually heard you mention this in another location. I was shocked to hear the number.
29:40
Dave Anderson
On the one hand it sounds really high, but when you realize what we're spending for electricity, you realize that this is something from an economic perspective that's totally doable.
29:50
Mark Jacobson
Let me answer that. But first I want to address a good point you just made, that residential solar costs are higher than the costs I mentioned. And that's because the costs I mentioned were utility scale prices of solar, which less dollar a water less. But yeah, residential could be $4 a water higher. It's really a question of economies of scale because residential is the most expensive. Then you can get communities solar is a little bit less, maybe industrial solar is even a little less, then you get utility scales less. And it's really what I understand is mostly cost of labor for doing one home versus multiple homes versus yeah, it's.
30:30
Dave Anderson
Those soft costs, right? So it's the cost of you have to pull a permit at three to $500 per kind of 7 kw versus you still are going to have huge permitting fees for a utility scale project, but you're going to have much better economies of scale. And then you've got all of the design components. In Australia, for example, I can call and order solar today and get it installed tomorrow. Residentially for around a buck 20. The permitting is a standardized process. There's no fees for it. It's just a much different process. Here in the United States, we've figured out a way to add a lot of these soft costs. And then the last part is our customer acquisition costs are extremely high, particularly in California. The marketing and sales component to solar is really high on a unit economic basis.
31:21
Mark Jacobson
Well. I've noticed that one of the barriers to getting residential rooftop solar, or even utilities, any other type of rooftop solar, is that utilities are against it and have been fighting tooth and nail to try totally to reduce rooftop solar and the benefits from it. We'll need both utility scale solar and rooftop solar for a transition. We can't just do all utility scale or we can't just do all rooftop because just this the problem is so huge, we do need both. But there is this advantage of rooftop solar. There are several advantages aside from the fact that you need less transmission because you're using a lot of your own electricity from the rooftop solar. And the reduction of transmission line requirements is actually very pivotal because fires in California, for example, in Maui were due to transmission line fires. And utilities that are trying to prevent the growth of rooftop solar could actually be increasing the chances of fires because of them requiring more utilities transmission lines.
32:33
Mark Jacobson
The other obvious benefits are that you do consume your own power and that enables you to eliminate a lot of electricity bills and additional costs associated with electricity bills. And this is what the utilities don't like. But it also enables you in a blackout to provide your own power. If you have batteries as well, in fact, it's very seamless because I have batteries in my home and whenever there's been I'm connected to the grid, but I supply about 120% of my household needs solar electricity and I send the rest back to the grid. But when there is a blackout, then the batteries kick instantaneously and can provide power to essential needs. I would strongly urge people who see their utilities trying to oppose rooftop solar to really push back against them because they're really just harming this transition, trying to prevent a large scale growth of rooftop solar.
33:35
Mark Jacobson
But back to your question about large scale costs. So we calculate that worldwide the capital cost of transitioning, this includes rooftop solar costs and their capital costs and utility scale and wind costs, batteries and everything else transmission lines is on the order of $62 trillion. But we save a huge amount of money worldwide by transition because we reduce the energy requirements by only order of 56% electrification and providing the electricity with windwater solar. And that's due to five reasons. One is battery. Electric vehicles are much more efficient than internal combustion engine vehicles. Worldwide there's only 15% reduction power. Demand due to any individual vehicle could reduce its demand by about 75%. But averaged overall energy sectors, it's about a 15% reduction. Then heat pumps instead of combustion heaters, that also reduces demand worldwide by a significant amount, or 20%. And then electrification of industry reduces demand a few percent.
34:48
Mark Jacobson
Most people are not aware that about 11.3% of all energy worldwide is used in mine, transport and refine fossil fuels and uranium. We eliminate that energy and then we think we can get additional end use energy efficiency improvements down by another 6% or 7%. So when we added that all up, it's about 56% reduction of the end use power demand. And that means if your cost per unit energy is the same with renewables versus fossil fuels, if you're using 56% less energy, you're paying 56 fewer dollars every year. But in fact, the cost per unit energy of renewables, when you look at the aggregate overall all sector transformation, we're going to get at least a 15% reduction cost per unit energy. So we find that in 2050, the annual costs are 63% lower worldwide for energy than with fossil fuels. So that's instead of right now, the world spends about $11 trillion per year on energy.
35:51
Mark Jacobson
And that's expected to rise to about $17 to $18 trillion per year by 2050. But if we electrify and provide the electricity with clean, renewable energy, we go down to about six and a half trillion dollars per year with just wind, water, solar. So it's about $11 trillion per year difference. So if we're saving $11 trillion per year and our capital cost is $62 trillion up front, that means the payback time is on the order of five to six years. So it's much cheaper no matter how you look at it. That's before you even account for the health and climate cost savings, which are another $30 trillion each. Health costs right now due to energy are about $30 trillion per year based on statistical costs of life worldwide. And climate costs in 2050 are expected to be $30 trillion per year. So we would say in 2050, the 30 plus 30 at 60 trillion plus another $11 trillion per year in energy costs, that's saving about $71 trillion per year.
36:55
Mark Jacobson
And so we reduce our social cost by about 92%. So 63% reduction of energy costs, 92% reduction of social costs due to transitioning the world to wind, water, solar. It's a no brainer. It's really silly. Pursue this.
37:10
Dave Anderson
So when you take the math equation, you look at 60, 211 trillion, you're offsetting it looks like a five year, six year payback type of a thing. Just to take the exercise out a little bit further, though, I'm curious. First of all, has there been scrutiny on that $62 million number as it relates to how easily will we be able to scale these different technologies? Are we going to have a scale advantage or a disadvantage as we make that transition? That's the first question. I've got several others to sort of, like, challenge you on that, but I'll start with that one.
37:44
Mark Jacobson
Yeah. First, this is a transition that's from now until 2050. So these numbers are 2050 numbers.
37:51
Dave Anderson
Got you.
37:51
Mark Jacobson
I mean, I think there's nothing intrinsically that stops us from transitioning. It's really a political and social question whether we can actually galvanize society to do this. And I'm not saying we can. I mean, I would say we have to try the best we can to do it, but there's no reason. Like during World War II, the world built about 800,000 airplanes in five years from almost nothing. And it was a massive and also ships and other types of industry just ramped up. So when there's an emergency, I think if we decide we want to do so, when I say we the world collectively because just the US doing it or just even China is doing it or just some individual countries doing it is not enough, we need everybody to do. Whether that happens is really a political, social question. So I can't answer that.
38:47
Mark Jacobson
But I can say that we can try our best. And I think from my role is to educate people about the possibility and try to encourage them to do this because it's something that concluded is a good thing. But can we ramp up? Again, there's no technical reason why we can't. It's really a question whether we want.
39:10
Dave Anderson
So what's built into that $62 trillion number? Is it talking about just the generation of the energy or is it talk about the infrastructure? Because obviously useful life of a combustion engine car is 20 plus years at this point. So when you're talking about a transition, you have to talk about getting rid of all combustion engines on the road and transitioning to EVs, for example. So what's built into that $62 trillion number? And if everything isn't built in, what are the other added or superfluous costs? Not superfluous, excuse me the additional costs that we're going to incur as part of that transition.
39:48
Mark Jacobson
Well, yeah. So what it includes is it's new generation of electricity, like new solar, new wind. So we have some existing wind and solar and hydro. We don't add any new hydro in his plans, but it's all new generation plus storage. So cost of batteries cost some cost traded solar power with storage costs. Well, we also have existing pumped hydro. There's some new pumped hydro storage in the plans. It's cost of new extra long distance transmission. It's cost of new heat pumps for district heating systems. Like when you have an underground thermal energy storage, for example, then you'll need to convert some electricity to heat to supply the heat for underground storage. But it does not include like the it assumes that cars, for example, that as you said, like cars will last 1520 years. So in 1520 years, everybody's going to car is going to buy a new car.
40:56
Mark Jacobson
So you're going to spend the same amount whether on approximately at that time, the same amount on whether it's electric car or fossil fuel car. So it's assumed very simplistically that people are spending about the same on new infrastructure, certain new things. Like when you're buying a new heater, when your gas heater breaks down in your home and you buy a new heat pump, it's going to be similar, especially it turns out though. You save a lot of money when you buy a new heat pump or gas electric car versus a gasoline car. You're going to save a lot of money in gasoline, far more than the higher capital cost today. But so the appliances assumes that we would be spending that money anyway. So this is new stuff that would not new money that would not be needed for most new appliances. However, having said that, even fossil fuel plants, let's say we didn't go to windwater solar, we would be spending a lot of money on new fossil fuel plants as well.
41:57
Mark Jacobson
So this is not like money that just has to come out of nowhere. This is money that's going to be spent anyway for the most part. All of it the 62 trillion plus car vehicle cost. But it does not include vehicle costs because we're assuming that the vehicles are just being replaced or would be spend money on those anyway.
42:16
Dave Anderson
Yeah. So one of the things that I oftentimes ask the guests that come onto the show, particularly people that have sort of like an expertise like you do, is a lot of homeowners are passionate about the idea of transitioning to renewables but maybe feel a little bit helpless in terms of their own ability to do so. Now obviously people can go solar, people can buy electric vehicles. But what are the biggest impact drivers that any individual can and should be doing that are sort of like free? It doesn't cost them anything to make the transition environmentally, socially or financially that they can do that makes a difference in terms of transitioning us more towards a renewable society.
42:59
Mark Jacobson
Well, the lowest hanging fruit is, for example, weatherizing your home ceiling cracks because all it requires is some caulk or ceiling cracks in windows and doors. Another low hanging fruit is changing your light bulb to Led light bulbs then certainly driving less telecommuting, more bicycling, using less energy in general. But most everything else has some cost. But a lot of this cost sometimes is something you'd be spending anyway. So like when your next time your heater breaks down, you want to get an electric heat pump, air heater. Same with air conditioner, heat pump, air conditioner or water heater. When it breaks down, get an electric heat pump, water heater or dryer electric induction cooktop. Next vehicle, be electric vehicle. So there are things you can do in your own life like these trying to electrify everything over time, but also trying to support policies or support policymakers who want to transition as well.
44:13
Mark Jacobson
From a policy point of view, people collectively can make decisions to decide they want to get some policies enacted. That means you have to support policymakers who support clean, renewable energy.
44:26
Dave Anderson
Yeah. From your perspective, what are the most important policies to champion? Right. There are things that maybe are lower impact but come up on the ballots. Things like moving away from plastic straws to paper straws, for example. What are the policies that people should really keep an eye on and watch that they should sort of prioritize as important policies to really well, I think.
44:50
Mark Jacobson
That the most effective policy to date have been renewable portfolio standards requiring the transition to 100% renewables in the electric power sector. And so there are 19 states and territories that have such laws and policies to go to 100% renewables. But I think those policies need to be extended to other sectors. So transportation, we need to go to 100% electric vehicles, which include some hydrogen fuel cell for long distance heavy transport. And you stage that. So by certain year you 20%, certain year you have 30%, et cetera. But ideally we'd transition completely such that all new vehicles would be 100% renewables. All new vehicles sold should be 100% renewables within a few years. In fact, we shouldn't be able to sell anything. Also, more than three years from Norway last year, I think 90% of all the new vehicles were electric and they have a substantial portion of their entire fleet is now electric Norway.
45:51
Mark Jacobson
So it is possible to do same thing with buildings. We want to transition buildings and all new buildings should be fully electric and we should be able to try to have policies to go to 100% electrification of existing buildings. So retrofitting, same thing industry, we need timelines. We should have 100%, there should be no new fossil sources past 2035 for anything. I mean, even long distance aircraft, we should have hydrogen fuel cell for long distance and electric battery electric for a short distance before that.
46:28
Dave Anderson
Yeah, maybe because you're in academia, I'll maybe ask the question. So I get a lot of young people that ask me like, hey, I believe in this energy transition, I think it's inevitable. How do I best position myself to be in a place that I can be both impactful, but also from a career perspective, be in the right place? So I'm sure as a professor and as an advisor, you've had a lot of people that have asked you similar sorts of questions. How do you sort of like guide people through that conversation?
46:56
Mark Jacobson
Well, I think we want to focus on clean renewable energy. So wind, water, solar electrification, storage, also making the grid more efficient, controls on the grid. These are the jobs where young people should be aiming and also electric appliances and machines. But don't get distracted by what I call all of the above policy technologies such as carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen, electrofuels, small modular nuclear reactors, any type of bioenergy, geoengineering. These are technologies are totally not helpful one bit for solving the air pollution or climate problems or energy security problems we face. But they're getting a lot of play in the press and in fact, the Inflation Reduction Act, about 40% of the funding is going to these useless endeavors. Do nothing but distract us from real solutions. I would suggest as students.
48:02
Dave Anderson
Yeah, I would say that's certainly a hot take even for this podcast, right? So maybe you can kind of expand on that a little bit more. Why they're useless. Why are you so focused specifically on and by the way, we call this the solar podcast, this isn't bad news for us, but why are you so focused on solar, wind and water? Why are these other hydrogen, nuclear, why are these technologies not part of the renewable energy mix?
48:30
Mark Jacobson
Well, I should clarify that green hydrogen is good, which is hydrogen produced from windwater, solar electricity. But the applications of hydrogen should only be ammonia production, steel production, long distance transport. Some uses for electricity production on the grid as storage, but not for heating buildings not transported in pipelines, not for passenger vehicles, not for combustion, which are the fossil fuel industry is trying to push hydrogen into everything and they want to use what's called well. 96% of all hydrogen produced worldwide today is gray hydrogen, which is from natural gas. And the natural gas industry wants to keep this natural gas produced hydrogen, but use carbon capture with natural gas production of hydrogen. And that's called blue hydrogen. So we do not support that at all for any purpose because blue hydrogen means you have more mining natural gas and there's no carbon capture on the mining.
49:34
Mark Jacobson
You need two types of carbon capture equipment on steam reforming natural gas to produce hydrogen anyway, you need to trap the CO2 and transport it. And 75% of all CO2 captured today is used for enhanced oil recovery. And that process releases 40% of the CO2 right back to the air. But the point is, the fossil fuel industry has four technologies that it's been pushing. Blue hydrogen, carbon capture, direct air capture, and electrofuels. All of them involve keeping the fossil fuel industry in business. And they're completely useless for climate. So why not carbon capture? Well, carbon capture requires energy and equipment. And even in the best case, when they're using renewable energy to power the carbon capture equipment, that renewable energy then cannot be used to replace a fossil fuel carbon dioxide source, an air pollution source such as coal or natural gas. And using renewable energy to replace a fossil source reduces more CO2 than does using that same renewable energy to run carbon capture.
50:40
Mark Jacobson
Plus that using renewable to replace the fossil source eliminates the air pollution, fossil mining, and the fossil infrastructure. Carbon capture doesn't do any of it. So the result is carbon capture only increases air pollution and it increases fossil mining, increases fossil infrastructure, and it increases carbon dioxide. So it has no useful purpose whatsoever. And most of it's used for enhanced oil recovery and you got to store it and then you got to build pipelines over people's land. It's just a ridiculous proposition. Direct air capture, where you're sucking CO2 out of the air exactly the same requires even more energy. That energy, even if renewable, then prevents the renewable energy from replacing a fossil source, therefore increasing CO2, increasing air pollution, increasing fossil mining, increasing fossil infrastructure, electrofuels. There are fuels that try to replace gasoline by taking that CO2 captured from one of these other sources, combining with other chemicals that have to be mined and using a lot of energy to put those together to produce electrofuels to replace gasoline, which is still the electric fuels are still burned.
51:44
Mark Jacobson
So again, you have this ridiculous carbon capture but now you have even worse chemical processes and all energy requirements to basically do the same thing as gasoline. Whereas it's much better to go to battery electric vehicles powered by windwater or solar for small modular nuclear reactors. Well, they don't exist. They're not even going to be commercial till no sooner than 2030. And right now the costs are supposed to be similar. There's no evidence they'll take any less time than large reactors. There's no evidence they'll have less risk of weapons proliferation risk. In fact, it's easier because they're smaller. You can move around the world meltdown risk. There's some technologies claim they don't have such meltdown risk evidence we've seen and other technologies still have it. There's underground uranium mining risk, lung cancer risk. 10% of all uranium miners underground have died from lung cancer historically.
52:39
Mark Jacobson
Wow. You have to store waste for hundreds of thousands of years and if you reprocess the waste you make, you create more weapons grade materials. So there's really no benefit we've seen, of small modular reactors over large reactors. They could have the same problems in terms of costs and delays. Yeah.
52:57
Dave Anderson
So I guess I was expecting you to at least spend a little bit more time talking about how it's just a half step that's a distraction to a better solution. But I think what you're really saying is it's just worse.
53:08
Mark Jacobson
It's worse. It makes the problem worse and harder to solve.
53:11
Dave Anderson
It's one of those things where to me it just feels like a math problem. Why then, if it's such a straightforward math problem, do we allow ourselves to get distracted with these sorts of things? If it really is as simple as saying the math says that this is.
53:24
Mark Jacobson
Worse, well, it's because there are a lot of people have different interests. The fossil fuel industry, of course, has a self interest to stay alive and so they're going to oppose that. The nuclear industry has a self interest. The agriculture industry has self interest to promote biofuels. And then you have some scientists who are just stuck on beliefs. Then you have policymakers who don't know what to don't know who to believe. And so they just default to the all of the above. Let's just try everything and hope something works. So I think the main problem is education for those who don't have a financial self interest in it. So educating the public and policymakers, but it's difficult because there's so much information being thrown at people. People don't believe.
54:11
Dave Anderson
Yeah, I mean, you're distilling it down and speaking fairly matter of factly about it such that it leads me to believe that the solutions are fairly straightforward. It just seems like we need the right people to listen to the very straightforward solutions and straightforward answers. I think that you speak in an extremely compelling way. I know that our listeners are going to love hearing that there is a wind, solar and water approach to electrifying our lives that's clean, it's renewable, and it doesn't have a negative impact on us. Then the transition is going to be something that's both possible. And again, just going back to your book, it's not a miracle, right? So there's no miracle needed. It's something that we are in control of and that we can sort of like usher in this transition and do it in a very calculable way. And a phrase that I love.
55:01
Dave Anderson
Again, just going back to, it's just math, right? I mean, this is just a math problem that we're solving.
55:05
Mark Jacobson
Well, yeah, you said it better than I could have said it. It's a really straightforward problem and we have the technologies, we have the wherewithal. At this point, the key is to just deploy, deploy. If we deploy as much as possible first, costs will go down even more upon more and more deployment just due to economies of scale. And that is if people say, oh, well, it's going to be hard to keep the grid stable when we have 95% renewables, well, let's get there and have that solve that problem closer to point. We're not even close to that point.
55:39
Dave Anderson
Let's go solve that problem. I like that. Mark, I know that you're highly sought after. We're absolutely flattered and thrilled that you came on and spent as much time with us as you did. It's been absolutely fantastic. I know that I've actually heard some of these things and I've actually studied a lot of the research that you've done and it's been great to just hear it from you firsthand. And I know that our listeners are going to be extremely excited to learn some of these things for themselves. Maybe just real quick, I actually purchased your book. The easiest place I found it was on Amazon. I'm sure that it's easily accessible in other places as well. That's where I bought it. But again, Mark, thank you so much for coming on and listening to, or excuse me, sharing what I think is a really straightforward approach to a solution that we all agree we should be working on.
56:23
Dave Anderson
And it's nice to know that this is something that we can do together.
56:26
Mark Jacobson
Well, thank you for having me on, Dave. I really appreciate it.