The world is slowly moving towards a greener future, albeit the pace is drastically different from country to country. From individuals to corporations to governmental levels, steps to ensure the environment’s stability going forward (and to undo some of the damage humanity has already caused – collectively) are being taken. One of these steps is electrification.
Electrification is the process, phenomenon, or the trend of switching from fossil-fuel-powered tools and technologies to electric-powered alternatives. The concept is that it would contribute towards lowering the overall carbon footprint and improving the environment.
While switching to electrification technology can reduce carbon emissions in certain situations, it’s not the holy grail of green solutions as it’s sometimes made out to be. If you want to make informed decisions about your carbon footprint, it’s imperative that you don’t fall prey to some of the common misconceptions regarding electrification.
Suppose you want to reduce your carbon footprint, and one of the ways you’ve chosen is electrification. From gas heaters and gasoline-fueled cars to all electric alternatives, the transition can be quite significant, and if we calculate just your carbon footprint, it would indeed be lighter with electrification. However, the truth might not be so attractive when you look at the big picture, i.e., where the electricity that you are using in lieu of fossil fuel is coming from and its carbon footprint.
A narrow focus on the carbon footprint of the end-users, while disregarding the whole electricity “supply chain” (from production to distribution), is the main cause of most common misconceptions regarding electrification.
Unless you live in Iceland, Norway, or New Zealand, this is not even close to reality. In the US, renewables, including wind, hydropower, solar, and biomass, generate only about one-fifth (19.8% to be exact) of the total electricity in the country. A similar portion is generated by nuclear power, and the remaining 60%, or two-thirds, come from fossil fuels. So even if you do switch to electric heat, if your electricity is coming from a power plant that uses fossil fuel, it might completely reverse the carbon benefit. And it’s unlikely to change much anytime soon. According to the EIA’s (US Energy Information Administration) projections, renewables will produce approximately 42% of the electricity by 2050, and even then, it will be neck-to-neck with fossil fuel.
Another misconception is that power plants can efficiently produce electricity from fossil fuels. Some say that if you are using natural gas for heating your home, you waste more “energy” than electric heat because electric heat is 100% efficient. That may be true on an individual consumption basis, but the big picture numbers refute that as a hypothesis as well.
The average efficiency of power plants in the US that use fossil fuel (predominantly coal and natural gas) is 33%. Conventional natural gas power plants are about 35% to 40% efficient. However, the efficiency of a gas turbine power plant can be increased to 60% to 70% by employing modern CHP (Combined Heat and Power) co-generation processes. Because conventional power plants are not very efficient at producing electricity, the electricity you are receiving might be far less “green” than the fossil fuel you use on-site, resulting in an increase in your overall carbon footprint with electrification rather than the intended reduction. See misconception 4 below regarding electrical transmission and distribution system losses.
Considering the inefficiency of electricity-generation from fossil fuels, the inefficiency of the power grid combined with the fact the three-fifths of the total electricity in the country comes from fossil fuel, it’s easy to see why thinking electric heat is “greener” is a misconception. The electricity is only as green as the source itself. If the source is renewable, then yes, electricity is greener than gas heat, but it would only be true in areas where the predominate source of power is from renewable sources and any additional incremental power consumption is also obtained from renewable sources. Unfortunately, these conditions do not exist in most areas of the United States.
Many proponents of electrification argue that it’s more efficient to get power from a power plant (even if the plant uses natural gas to produce electricity) than using the natural gas yourself to generate energy, usually for heating purposes. This can be easily refuted by examining the efficiency of power plants and the power distribution grid. As noted above, even the most efficient natural-gas-based power plants don’t exceed efficiency levels of 60% to 70%. High-efficiency gas furnaces and boilers, on the other hand, can reach efficiency levels as high as 97%.
And that’s disregarding the loss of energy in transportation and distribution of the power. About 5% of all electricity generated is lost in the transmission lines and an additional 17.5% in the power company’s distribution systems and transformers. So using an electric heater instead of a gas heater loses efficiency points here as well.
This is a very simple misconception to dispel by remembering one simple fact: Coal is “dirty” compared to natural gas. Coal produces about 1.9 times more carbon dioxide to produce the same amount of energy than natural gas. And it can go as high as 2.4 if you use newer, more energy-efficient CHP gas turbines. That’s simply because of the chemical composition of each fossil fuel. Coal has a higher carbon content than natural gas. The energy produced by burning coal comes almost exclusively from the formation of CO2 from carbon, whereas the energy from combustion of natural gas includes the formation of both carbon and water from CH4.
While not considered “renewable”, nuclear energy is a low carbon alternative to fossil fuel based power. A nuclear power plant doesn’t generate carbon as a direct result of power production, however the process of extracting, refining, and disposing of nuclear waste generally does requires fossil fuel to operate. In any case, the carbon emissions of nuclear power are minimal compared to that of fossil fuels.
This is one of the most “logical” misconceptions on this list. Many people believe that since the country, in general, is moving away from fossil fuels and most new power generation sources that are currently being built are renewable, any additional electricity generated to meet the surging demands comes from these new plants. But that’s not the case.
Renewables produce electricity proportional to the efficiency of the system and the natural source powering them, i.e., solar, wind, or water in most cases. Naturally, you can’t increase the power production from these plants at a given time since you can’t control the energy source. But you can control the energy production from fossil-fuel plants. Fossil fuel-based power plants that can offer energy on demand (if the need spikes) are called marginal power plants. Incremental increases in electrical consumption still come primarily from fossil fueled power plants, so until there is enough renewable energy to meet 100% of the base load, every additional electric heater that we plug in will result in higher carbon emissions than a comparable natural gas fired heater.
Electrification may be part of the answer to environmental problems and reducing humanity’s carbon footprint, however it’s not the full answer. For your electrification switch to matter, you have to be more discerning about where your electricity is coming from. If more consumers start moving towards power generation companies that rely solely upon renewables and nuclear power, the carbon change initiative might get expedited. However, in areas where power is predominately generated from fossil fuels, it may be “greener” to utilize fossil fuel based heating and build in the ability to switch to electric heat at a future date, once the power grid itself becomes more green.
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