This is Climate One. I'm Greg Dalton.

Fully electrifying our homes and cars could cut the amount of total energy we need by half.

We generate our electricity thermoelectrically, but a huge amount of that energy is wasted as heat.

President Biden wants half of the cars sold in the U.S. to be electric by 2030, and automakers are

increasingly putting money and marketing muscle behind EVs. We are seeing opportunities in more

states with electrification, and the expansion of this market is huge, and we've really only begun

to scratch the surface. And as we make this shift, equity is essential.

It is simply stated and obviously true that you don't fix climate change if only 50% of people

can afford the solutions.

Electrifying everything.

Next on Climate One.

And the not too distant future, your entire home could be electric, from your stove to your water heater to the car you drive.

And all of it might be powered by solar panels on your own roof or one nearby, which would

also put power back into the grid. This is part of the net zero

future envisioned by inventor and entrepreneur Saul Griffith in his new book, Electrify, an optimist

playbook for our clean energy future. Griffith says when we electrify everything, we'll only need

about half the energy we currently use. Fundamentally, electric machines don't generate the waste heat that internal combustion engines do.

An electric car uses about one-third of the energy to go the same distance as a gasoline car,

provided that you provide the electricity from a clean source like wind or solar or hydroelectricity.

When you use a heat pump to heat a room, it uses about one-third the energy that a natural gas heater would use to heat the same room.

And then what's underappreciated in the American energy economy today, and in, in all the countries of the world, is that we generate our electricity thermoelectrically.

What that means is we heat water to make steam, spin a turbine, to turn a generator to make electricity.

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