The Smart Energy Shift That Could Save Billions—and the Grid

Electrifying our homes and cars could slash emissions and even cut costs—but it comes with a catch: a massive surge in electricity demand that today’s grid isn’t built to handle. This research reveals how smarter buildings, more efficient technologies, and especially better timing of energy use—like coordinating EV charging and heating—could dramatically ease the strain, potentially saving hundreds of billions in infrastructure upgrades. The future of clean energy isn’t just electric—it’s intelligently managed.

Transcript

00:00:00 My name is Kevin Kercher. I'm an assistant professor in the school of mechanical engineering at Purdue University. So, collectively, the energy that we use in our homes and our vehicles uh cause something like half of u US greenhouse gas emissions. And one good way to reduce the climate impacts of all of our personal activities would be to switch um things like space

00:00:21 heating and water heating and cooking and driving over from fossil fuels to electricity. This has the potential to lower utility bills. Um, it also has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly, especially if the electricity that powers all those new devices comes from clean uh generation sources. So, electrifying a home means replacing the fossilfueled

00:00:43 equipment that we have in our homes with electric machines that kind of provide the same services. Uh, so for example, u many of us have uh natural gas furnaces or boilers that provide the heating that comes out of our ducts or or radiators. And uh so electrifying a heating system would generally mean uh switching to an electric heat pump which is an efficient electric machine a bit like an air

00:01:05 conditioner that can run in reverse uh that can provide uh lowcost and and clean heating for a home. Uh another example of electrification would be a water heater. So many of us use, for example, a propane or a natural gas water heater, and that could be switched over either to an electric resistance water heater or to a more efficient heat pump water heater, which might cost more

00:01:24 upfront, but would use about half the electricity. And then finally, electrification can involve um the various other appliances, things like stoves and dryers. Uh replacing these things uh and crucially replacing the fossil fueled vehicles, uh things like the cars and and trucks that we fuel up with uh gasoline and switching those over to electric

00:01:43 vehicles. While switching to uh electric heating, water heating, and and driving um could reduce emissions a lot, uh it also could drive electricity demand uh significantly higher than it is today. And in particular, the peak electricity demand that might happen in the most extreme weather conditions could be much higher than what we experience today.

00:02:05 And those new peaks in electricity demand would put new strain on electricity grid infrastructure and particularly the distribution grid, which is kind of the component of the grid that our buildings plug directly into. Um, by contrast to the high voltage transmission grid, which is the big power lines that you might drive by uh in a rural area on a road trip,

00:02:24 something like that. So in this paper we investigated what would happen to electricity distribution grids if we electrified all the homes and private vehicles in the United States. And we found kind of there two cases. Um if we don't do anything we will drive peak electricity demand well beyond the safe limits of today's infrastructure and that could put power

00:02:45 reliability at risk and potentially lead to you know increased frequency uh and duration of of blackouts. Um on the other hand, if we do reinforce the power grid to accommodate all the new uh electricity demand growth, then we could find that uh the cost of adding lots of new infrastructure to the grid, things like thicker power lines and bigger transformers uh could be on the

00:03:08 order of half a trillion uh which is about $5,000 per household uh in the United States. So we investigated three strategies for mitigating the uh required upsizing of electricity grid infrastructure. Uh one involved reducing the demand for heating and cooling in our buildings and that could happen for example through insulating and air sealing buildings. Um, but it could also

00:03:31 happen over time through a gradual shift from more detached single family housing like you might see in the suburbs today uh to attached multif family housing things like rowouses and condos which tend to have much lower uh heating and cooling demand per square foot of floor area. Uh that was the first is more efficient building reduction in thermal demand. The second strategy we looked

00:03:52 into is more efficient equipment. Um so kind of in our baseline scenarios we looked at electrifying heating and cooling equipment with basically the equipment that's available today. Uh the main version of which that's used in the United States is called an air source heat pump. Um so in uh a comparison study we looked at more efficient heating equipment uh geothermal heat

00:04:11 pumps which typically use less than half the energy of today's kind of standard air source heat pumps. Um and then in addition to those two strategies, the third that we looked at was coordinating uh when devices operate. So for example, to stagger the operation of an electric vehicle charging station with the operation of a heat pump um so that we don't have all the devices running full

00:04:33 blast at the same time. And these are strategies that we've investigated to various degrees in hardware at our test house here at Purdue University. Um in the study here we found through modeling that if we use the combination of all three of those strategies that we could reduce the required reinforcement of distribution grids to accommodate electrification by something like 2/3.

00:04:54 One surprise that came up in the study was that the third strategy that we investigated uh coordinating when devices are operating was surprisingly effective. So on its own it reduced the uh required uh grid buildout by about 40%. And uh that's more than either of the other two strategies that we investigated sort of individually. And the reason that for me that was

00:05:16 surprising is that the other strategies so insulating homes for example um or inventing and deploying much more efficient heating and cooling equipment um those are complicated and they can be time inensive and particularly they can be pretty expensive for the homeowner. Um so by contrast coordinating when devices are operating is fairly inexpensive. uh it requires mostly

00:05:39 software and communication things like smart thermostats and smart EV chargers which are increasingly being adopted already today for other purposes. Um and yeah, the effect of it uh by coordinating all of those devices to reduce the uh required grid buildout by about 40% which is hundreds of billions of dollars across the the entire um United States. Uh it was really

00:06:01 surprisingly effective.