This week’s guest on Cleaning Up is Matt Ferrell. Matt is host of the hugely popular Undecided YouTube channel and the podcast Still to be Determined, both of which explore the impact of smart and sustainable technologies on our daily lives.
Matt and Michael discuss how they came to focus on the net-zero transition from different starting points, why hydrogen is so divisive, the joys and perils of going net-zero at home, and share their predictions for the coming years in the energy sector.
Matt Ferrell I've talked about hydrogen on the channel, my YouTube channel. I'm curious, why is it so divisive? Why is that topic so divisive?
Michael Liebreich I think it's a kind of faith-based technology. Nobody can tell exactly what it's going to do, and therefore you can hang whatever hopes, whatever tribal markers you have on it. My view is, I think that we've got certain things that you have to do with clean hydrogen. We make fertilizer with grey hydrogen, and hydrogen produces over 2% of global emissions. So, do I love clean hydrogen? Yeah, as long as we use it to do something about that problem. But, I've just done too much analysis on the economics, the thermodynamics, the safety, the human behaviour, the history of failure of hydrogen to live up to its promise, to just postulate it as a solution for everything. But that enrages some people extraordinarily.
MF Yeah. For me, it's shocking that it's so polarizing. I have a nuanced take on hydrogen. It's not a silver bullet for everything; it makes sense for energy storage in some fashion, but it doesn't seem to be the silver bullet for heating homes,
ML There are now 40 reports that say that hydrogen in heating just makes little or no sense. You could have 400 reports: the people who want it - either because they're romantics, or because they hate the idea of a heat pump, or because they own a gas pipeline - they're not going to be proven wrong by some report, or by ten reports, or 100 reports. They've actually got to try and dig up a street and try it and fail, and then we'll move on.
MF I feel like there's a conversation around nuclear that's similar to this.
ML Nuclear is already a polarized debate going back many decades. Germany tried to exit nuclear, and people can barely remember why they were so anti-nuclear now, given Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The mistake nuclear advocates make is that instead of saying, hey, it's a big world, there's lots of energy demand, let's have some nuclear as well, which is where I am, far too many of them think that nuclear is the whole answer, which is just manifestly stupid. What happens when there's a fleet failure situation, like a car recall? But also, they manifest it by attacking other solutions. You won't sell a single nuclear plant by saying that wind and solar are rubbish. And yet they do it all the time. Can't we all just get along nicely?
MF I have one question about Japan: why are they so in on hydrogen? Is it because it's their only way to do energy independence?
ML So I called hydrogen earlier a faith-based technology, I think in Japan, there's an element of it being a saviour technology. 1973, the first oil crisis, caught Japan completely exposed because they don't have the domestic supplies themselves. And then along came these brilliant engineers who said, hydrogen can actually save us. Today, there is an alternative for Japan, which is a lot of offshore wind, as much solar as you've got space for, some geothermal and so on, nuclear, switch back on the ones you've got and import hydrogen or ammonia for long duration storage. But it's very hard to tell Japan – now with many of those brilliant young engineers in positions of influence - that it's time to move on from hydrogen. Physics doesn't care about jobs. If the battery solution is just going to be better physics and microeconomics and so on, those jobs are going to go. Japan could end up being energy uncompetitive on a grand scale, it's really scary. Likewise South Korea, to be honest, and Germany.
So, Matt, talk about your home. Tell us the foundation story, and tell us what you've got actually powering your home?
MF In my current home, I have solar panels and a Tesla Powerwall, but I'm building a new net-zero home, where I'm kind of practicing what I preach; I've been talking about all these different technologies and how we can make our homes better, so I'm building a home out around that, building a super energy efficient, super insulated, super airtight, Passivhaus-level quality home that's going to be powered by solar and have home energy storage, so that I can get to net-zero energy over the course of a year on my house. I heard this term for the first time just recently: a prosumer. As somebody with solar panels on my home, I'm a prosumer; I'm not just consuming, I'm also contributing to the grid. So, in the summertime, I'm producing a lot of extra energy that goes in, in the wintertime, I might use a little bit more. I'm doing my part for the community, being part of the grid, helping to supply extra energy for the utility. So, there’s this give-and-take being a prosumer on the grid that I really like.
ML So, what happens next? Where will the world be in five years, what do we think?
MF I think there's going to be a big surge of how much people want to provide for themselves, a desire for energy independence. So, I think there's gonna be a lot more interesting products for the consumer on the market for batteries, and energy storage systems that you can add not just to a house, but to an apartment. Energy storage seems like it's gonna be a big, big key player, because you can cost-shift. You have a little battery that you put in your apartment, and you can help kind of change when you're using the electricity and where you're pulling it from the grid to save yourself energy in your bill, which helps to shift when the energy is being used from the grid, which helps the grid and its stability. What's your five-year look?
ML I think electric heating is the next sector that's going to pop. And I don't mean just in the home; I do mean heat pumps, we see that already, growth rates are of 30%, 40% in Europe, and substantial growth worldwide, but also in industrial heat. Because the more you look at how do you solve industrial processes, the more you realize that it's just so much more elegant to do it with electricity. Not just in terms of it can be clean and net-zero but also, the processes become more controllable, you find all the energy efficiency opportunities. So, we're going to see that I think right across the economy. And so, the thing that I predicted is half a trillion-dollar market for electric heating.
MF I am optimistic about where things are heading. I feel like I'm in the minority, though. What about you?
ML Well, I'm mainly optimistic. We’ve bent the curve to the point where emissions are essentially flat. Concentrations are still soaring upwards, right? But the emissions are flat. We can probably land this thing at about two degrees of climate change. I think we can end up with a planet that is recognizable, with an economy that is delivering human progress and continues to do that. But at two degrees, there are going to be vulnerable people who have suffered and are suffering, and we need to also dip into the justice pockets and help those people, because just being an optimist and saying, it'll all be fine? I can't do that.