Look, I don’t want to be a party pooper. I’m all in on electrification. It’s the single biggest lever we have to achieve a cheaper, clearer, more resilient energy system. And I’ve talked about how electrification itself will bring down the cost of electricity.
Credit to the EU commission, it too is now all in on electrification. The problem is, it now proposing a target of 46% electrification by 2040, measured as Electricity / Final Energy, which is mathematically unachievable.
As I wrote in my recent piece, electrification is the right target, but percentage of Final Energy is the wrong metric. It’s a bad way of measuring electrification. It does not say what people think it says. It does not measure the proportion of electric things. It measures useful energy as a proportion of useful energy plus waste, which is a much smaller number - until the point when you have got rid of almost all your fossil assets and their associated waste.
Take the two most promising sectors for additional electrification: road transportation and space heating.
To get to to 46% Electricity / Final Energy in a road transport fleet requires around 80% of all vehicles to be electric. Not vehicle sales, but 80% of the entire fleet of vehicles*. And to get to 46% Electricity/Final Energy in space heating requires around 75% of it to be powered by heat pumps. Not 75% of new installations, but 75% of all heating in all buildings.
Why is this?
Say you have two cars, one electric and one petrol. You think you are 50% electrified? Not if you use Electricity/Final Energy as your metric, you aren’t. Final Energy for the petrol car is the energy content of the petrol you buy. For the electric car, it’s the energy content of the electricity you buy. If the electric car is 90% efficient and the petrol car is 20% efficient, that means the petrol car’s Final Energy is 4.5 times more than the electric car. Your Electricity/Final Energy is just 1/(1+4.5) or 18%.
And it’s the same for heat pumps. If you two houses, one with a heat pump with a COP of 3, and one heated with a boiler with 90%, then your Final Energy is dominated by the gas boiler. Your Electrification/Final Energy is 0.333/(0.33+1/0.9) or 23%.
Around 25% of car sales are electric today; because of the lifetime of cars, to get to 80% electric fleet by 2040 would require that to jump to 100% overnight. I’ve just taken over as Chair of PragmaCharge, and we’re looking at rolling out thousands of electric heavy trucks by 2030. But there are around 7 million heavy trucks on Europe’s roads right now. Around 0.5% of heavy tractor units on the road in Europe are currently electric, and less than 2% of sales. Does anyone think 80% of the heavy duty vehicle fleet will be electric in 14 years? Not a chance - heavy duty vehicles have shorter lives than cars, but sales would have to be 80% electric within a few years.
To get to 46% Electricity / Final Energy in heating, 75% of all space heating would need have been converted to heat pumps within just 14 years - requiring installation rates to soar immediately to improbable levels, for which training and supply chains simply don’t exist. It’s simply not going to happen.
I’m not saying this because I don’t love electrification, or I’m not ambitious, or I don’t think the EU is effective. I’m saying it because I understand the the Final Energy Fallacy, and I want others too understand it too - particularly if they are setting electrification targets.
Fossil fuel solutions are just so inefficient at point of use, they require 3-5x as much Final Energy as the electric alternatives. So any calculation of Electricity/Final Energy is dominated by the inefficiency of the fossil portion of the asset base. You can call it the Final Energy Fallacy.
In my piece about the electrification target being proposed for COP31 in Antalya, Let’s target 35% electrification, but of what? I shared this simple diagram which illustrates the problem.
I also shared the formula for converting between penetration of electric technologies and the calculation of Electrification/Final Energy.
We need the folks setting the targets to understand this stuff. It’s not about policy, or aspiration, or technology. It’s certainly not about whether we should electrify. It’s just arithmetic, and the need to set targets that everyone can understand, break down to individual sectors and countries, and deliver.
*Yes, if electric vehicles drive more km than ICE vehicles, the numbers change. But not by remotely enough to rescue the target. They would need to drive 4.5x as far as ICE cars in order for 46% electric cars to deliver 45% Electrification / Final Energy. If you think otherwise, please do some calculations before posting in the comments.
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