How much clean electricity do we really need? | Solomon Goldstein-Rose

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2021

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

To fight climate change, we need to clean up the global electricity system by replacing fossil fuel power plants with clean generation -- right? Climate author Solomon Goldstein-Rose thinks we need to do much more than that. Replacement isn’t enough, he explains in this compelling talk: we need to rapidly develop a new global system capable of producing 12 times the amount of clean electricity we generate today. He shares four reasons why we need that expansion -- first, to electrify everything in all parts of the world (not just the wealthy ones) -- as well as some intriguing ideas for how we can get there.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hume.
0:07.1	Clean energy is often discussed as the linchpin to get off our reliance on fossil fuels and truly address climate change.
0:13.8	But climate author Solomon Goldstein-Rose says the scale of the clean energy generation we need is wildly greater than we're estimating.
0:23.2	In his talk at the Countdown Summit in 2021, he lays out a vision of the ambitious electricity
0:29.3	system will need to achieve net negative emissions across the globe.
0:35.9	Are you ready to solve climate change?
0:38.9	Good.
0:40.3	Do you know what a petawatt hour is?
0:44.1	It's a unit of energy, like kilowatt hour or megawatt hour.
0:48.8	I've been a climate activist since age 11, and I studied engineering, and so I was familiar
0:53.7	with those terms, kilowatt, megawatt, even gigawatt, and I studied engineering, and so I was familiar with those terms,
0:55.1	kilowatt, megawatt, even gigawatt, and terawatt. But I had never heard of a petawatt hour
1:01.1	until I wrote a book on climate change solutions. That's because it's so big. But that's the
1:06.9	scale I want to talk about. A petawatt hour is a trillion kilowatt hours.
1:13.2	And today, the world generates about 25 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity each year.
1:19.6	Most of that is from fossil fuel power plants,
1:22.6	and the dominant mindset is that we have to change the current electricity system
1:26.9	by replacing those fossil fuel
1:28.3	plants with clean generation by 2050.
1:32.2	Well, over one-third of our electricity generation is already clean, mostly from hydro and nuclear,
1:38.1	along with wind and solar, and clean generation is growing.
1:41.8	Projections based on current policies around the world show that we are on
	...

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