Climate emergency

Lindsay Winkler
Nov 7 · 3 min read
Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

A climate emergency declaration would be an amazing economic stimulus. It would untether us from old technologies that are holding us back, and free us to pull in a common direction towards new solutions.

Like a dragging anchor, with considerable effort we can haul the technical legacy of our energy and transport infrastructure a small distance in the right direction. But a much better approach is just to cast the line overboard and get moving. Change like that is hard — but in a state of emergency, humans can always push through and do what’s necessary.

The second aspect is that people love solving problems. Declaration of a climate emergency is the posting of a giant, challenging problem, and people will get excited about solving it once it’s elevated to its proper importance. All kinds of insurmountable challenges have been surmounted after all when people get aligned. Like a huge swarm of helium balloons attached to a banana lounge, we can really go places when we’re pulling in the same direction.

Let me give you a concrete example of how a shift in perspective can unlock pathways forward. We’re constantly told that we cannot transform our electricity grid: that high densities of residential rooftop solar lead to overvoltage situations, that renewables are too intermittent to deliver the energy we need. At the heart of this argument is the pessimistic belief that it would be flat out impossible to control six million home batteries and solar installations (about the number of households in Australia).

Bear in mind that the solar output and batteries can both be switched rapidly, and consider this: we’ve already successfully demonstrated a system that can deliver pornography to personal taste, on demand, to every bedroom in the country. That is, we can switch the value of two million pixels thirty times a second, to 16 million different values, in ten million bedrooms. Or bathrooms. Maybe kitchens — I don’t know. And yet we’re convinced we could never switch twelve million pixels either on or off, maybe a couple of times a second (where each pixel is a rooftop solar array, or a 10kWh battery).

Expressed slightly differently, if we think we have the wherewithal to stream a two-bit movie (literally) at two frames a second to most Australian households, we should be able to control a substantially more complex grid than what we’re led to believe. The movie just has to have some very simple properties, like the sum of the pixel values in local areas cannot exceed some maximum (that threshold being overvoltage on the local grid).

Many of you are probably thinking: You’re insane! Won’t somebody think of the lithium! But, but, but — my smart meter will spy on me watching pornography! Which is exactly why we need a climate emergency to be declared: to rotate our perspective from “that’s insane” to “that’s definitely viable”.

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