In the mainstream media and among the public, sustainable building advocates and environmentalists are sometimes characterized as overreacting to changes in climate or hypercritical when governments don’t implement all their recommendations. 

While, at times, there has been a grain of truth behind these assertions, current developments prove that the alarm of sustainability proponents and climate scientists is neither overblown nor radical.

Extreme Weather

Chart 1 shows how much extreme weather is increasing, along with the cost of damage. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, extreme weather damages totaled more than $165 billion in 2022 (https://on.cfr.org/3Sbhef2). Further, reinsurance company Swiss Re notes that the U.S. gross domestic product could drop by 7% and 14% in the next 25 years, depending on what we do about fossil fuels and methane (https://bit.ly/3vvOODR).

In 2022, the United States saw 18 weather events costing billions of dollars, including Hurricane Ian at $114 billion. More than 5,000 U.S. heat records were broken in the summer of 2023, and 90 million Americans were under heat alerts. The seven hottest days in 100,000 years happened in one week in July. In Antarctica, 2.6 million square kilometers of sea ice melted.

Insurance premiums are rising, and many people have either no insurance or inadequate insurance on their homes. When Hurricane Harvey dumped about 4 feet of rain on Houston in 2017, eight out of 10 flooded homeowners had no flood insurance. Although we often think of insurance companies as villains, an actuary firm called Milliman estimates that California’s unprecedented wildfires in 2017 and 2018 wiped out 25 years’ worth of profits for insurance companies in the state.

Bad News for Bad Technology

When the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act were passed, they represented the biggest spending on climate change in U.S. history. Environmentalists celebrated, but we also complained. Were our complaints justified?

Professor Mark Jacobson at Stanford remarked recently that although 60% of the measures would help mitigate climate change, 40% would do almost nothing, mentioning investments in carbon capture, blue hydrogen and small nuclear reactors.

New developments seem to have already shown this to be true. Pushed by key political donors, governments all over the world have allocated billions to carbon capture, despite the nonexistent business case for this so-called climate solution. 

Even the International Energy Agency, which is a conservative body, recently published projections that make this idea laughable. It points out that we would need more electricity than we currently use for all other purposes only for carbon capture, if fossil-fuel production continues the way governments plan in the next few decades. 

It says you would need to capture 32 billion tons of carbon by 2050 using equipment that consumes 26,000 terawatts of power. Globally, we used 24,398 terawatt-hours of electricity for all purposes in 2022. Carbon capture would cost more than $90 trillion by 2050.

Meanwhile, Jacobson says we can largely eliminate climate change for free in 145 countries, which emit 99.7% of world human-produced carbon dioxide, by investing about $62 trillion in technologies that work well and are sustainable into the future, such as heat pumps, electric vehicles, renewable power and batteries. 

This investment would be recouped in about 5 1/2 years due to approximately $11 trillion in annual energy cost savings created because these technologies are so much more efficient than their obsolete fossil-fuel counterparts. This more sensible investment seems to be happening at the same time as governments coddle their donors with fake solutions paid for by taxpayers. (Full disclosure: Professor Jacobson is a chapter contributor to my new book, “Proven Climate Solutions.”)

Another boondoggle technology currently receiving huge amounts of government funding is hydrogen, which has been hyped for 50 years but hasn’t really materialized. This year, one of the biggest and first projects was canceled in Germany despite huge financial and corporate support for the project. The green hydrogen project in the town of Heide, one of the first serious attempts with green hydrogen, was closed after three years of work because it outstripped all expectations on cost. 

It was hailed as the largest electrolyser in the country and was being developed by some of the world’s top engineering entities: Denmark’s Ørsted, France’s EDF and Switzerland’s Holcim. The idea was to use excess wind energy to produce hydrogen. The situation on-site was supposedly very favorable: the refinery had been connected to a hydrogen pipeline since 1964 and to a system of salt caverns to store the hydrogen. 

Governments are starting to think harder about the money they waste on “new” nuclear, which is perhaps the biggest joke. The Nu-Scale project in Ohio recently ended abruptly, again due to cost overruns, which for years have been predicted by every realistic economist in the world — except those employed by the nuclear industry. 

This project was really the last hope for “small nuclear reactors,” which have never made engineering, manufacturing or economic sense. Nuclear plants are dangerous — so is nuclear spent fuel, for which there is still no realistic storage solution. 

With 20-year planning and construction timelines, nuclear plants can’t be completed in time to help with climate change. They don’t even work in an overheated world with disappearing waterbodies because they can’t be cooled enough. It’s why about half of France’s plants close each summer now. However, as the latest PR campaign for a fading industry, small nuclear reactors have been good at attracting government funding largesse.

Latest News on Building Electrification

Unlike the distracting nonsolutions noted previously, solar rooftop continues to boom in the United States and beyond, along with other distributed renewables tech, such as batteries for buildings and microgrid communities. I’ve written a few times about fledgling virtual power plant (VPP) projects around America, but many more of them exist and their history of success is more convincing. 

Solar, distributed renewables, home batteries and VPPs are emerging as underappreciated solid solutions to many of the challenges associated with our transition to clean energy.

VPPs are created by entities called aggregators, who organize groups of homeowners or business owners who’ve installed their own solar and batteries. The aggregators work with the solar owners and utilities to turn these groups into significant energy assets, largely thanks to smart software, continuing grid integration IT development and advanced corollary hardware.

Audrey Lee, Laura Fedoruk and Steve Wheat worked at Sunrun beginning about 10 years ago, and they can properly be credited as some of the key individuals who put VPPs on the map in the United States. They worked first on commercial demand response programs and later on residential aggregations. 

Lee led projects at the executive level at both Sunrun and Advanced Microgrid Solutions. She also worked as a senior economist developing policy with the White House, the International Energy Agency and the California Public Utilities Commission. 

Fedoruk pioneered much of the load management and grid integration IT development and is now the technical program manager for Project Tapestry at X The Moonshot Factory (formerly Google X). Wheat worked on the front lines with customers and utilities as a project and operations manager and is now vice president of program management at Swell Energy in San Francisco.

The three co-authored an article for my new book, in which they point out that the U.S. electrical grid is very old, dating back to Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street station in Manhattan in 1882. 

“This lumbering behemoth doesn’t just have to keep up with the changes posed by transitioning to renewable energy,” say these experts, “it also has to maintain its operations in hundreds of overlapping marketplaces, with different rules, laws and policies at the federal, state and local level. It needs to decentralize itself so that power plants and large facilities once thought to be built in ‘safe’ areas are not threatened. 

“It faces new formidable threats such as floods, wildfires and occasional superstorms … The challenge of modernizing this grid is overdue, huge and complex. [However,] the tools to replace these technologies are already here, already active and deployed in the field.” 

Small Solar Booming Worldwide

Lee, Fedoruk and Wheat note that distributed energy storage and solar photovoltaic capacity in North America, Europe and Oceania will double between 2020 and 2025. In California, between 2012 and 2022, net energy metering of connected solar increased by about 30% each year, and in 2020, renewable energy, inclusive of rooftop generation and utility solar, accounted for more than 33% of the state’s total system generation. 

“As homes and businesses are electrified with flexibly scheduled connected loads and distributed energy resources, such as solar, battery storage and electric vehicles, the potential for VPP grid contributions will only increase,” they explain. “The ability to aggregate, monitor and control decentralized assets is becoming critical to achieving the levels of renewable energy contribution necessary to avert catastrophic climate change while also cutting costs and maintaining grid resilience and reliability. 

“Networks of decentralized energy resources can be monitored and controlled via advanced software systems to mimic larger-scale resources, despite being physically separate and even independently owned and operated.”

The Sunrun/National Grid ConnectedSolutions Program paid incentives to residential customers for using their smart thermostats for demand response. It offered customer payments to discharge their batteries up to a set number of times during summer to meet the energy demands on the hottest days when everyone usually turned on their air conditioners. 

“There is huge potential waiting on rooftops and in buildings that can make a difference to grid operation and planning, increasing resilience and decreasing grid carbon intensity,” the co-authors note. “Customer-owned assets are uniquely suited to increase grid resilience because they are located exactly where they can be used if a grid failure occurs. 

“These assets are a win for everyone — they can assist the grid when needed and provide customer resilience and customer cost savings. Including them and their potential grid services in comprehensive grid planning and operation makes sense.” 

The article reveals that the energy services team at Sunrun completed a study: only 75,000 solar and battery homes networked together, from more than 1.4 million Los Angeles-area customers, could replace approximately 300 megawatts of peaking capacity at one of the city’s retiring gas plants. 

They say VPPs are part of the sharing economy, similar to Airbnb or Uber: software-driven optimization of assets representing sunk investment that’s not optimally employed, such as a spare room in a house or a personal vehicle parked 97% of the time. 

Integrating Smart Homes and Smart Grids

However, they also point out that from a utility operator’s point of view, it is difficult to comprehend that a group of rooftop solar installations might represent a stable source of electricity. 

“Each home acts randomly,” they say. “Each solar system is set on a different roof in a different location, altered by the shadows of nearby trees, with batteries used either for backup power or bill savings. It represents a cacophony of energy, an unpredictable distribution system, and one with little visibility to the grid operator … Without coordination, it would be difficult to systematically change the load pattern of even a local electric grid with so many unknowns … coordination and strategy are needed.” 

For these reasons, aggregators, software engineers and smart IT data scientists are critical to the development of the modern grid. High-tech VPP teams also work on rationalizing groups of homeowners and business owners with different device types, models, manufacturers, utility bill structures and massive troves of data being created by each entity. 

It all must be analyzed and managed to develop a well-coordinated and optimized grid that adjusts for home energy demand and usage, real-time solar conditions, weather variability (local and regional), grid voltage conditions, frequency, current, operational states, and charging and discharging schedules. 

As I write this in late 2023, the Tesla Cybertruck has moved into production and deliveries. Along with the Ford F-150 Lightning electric, Rivian pickup truck, electric school buses, VW ID4 passenger car and others, the Tesla offers bi-directional charging. This means these vehicles can be used to power a home, usually for several days. 

Numerous other possible beneficial scenarios exist, including some known as vehicle-to-grid, echoing the concept of virtual power plants. I’ll look at vehicle-to-buildings and vehicle-to-grid in more detail later this year. 

As we tackle the increasing threats of climate change (and the problematic fossil-fuel lobbying/political donation systems in most countries), we will need electrified buildings, VPPs, bi-directional sharing with vehicles, and many other solutions to help ramp up our transition to clean energy.