Electrif-AI Everything

Saul Griffith, co-founder of Rewiring Australia, has built an AI assistant called Electric Saul in partnership with Google to advise households on electrification. The tool, trained on the organization's FAQ and event knowledge, answers questions about home electrification and has reportedly helped users make decisions on heat pumps and solar usage, with each comprehensive conversation costing about 30 cents to host. Griffith says uptake and feedback have been strong and he hopes to build a US version soon.

I'm co-hosting three things - Rewiring the World §rewiring-the-world and Pax Electricana §pax-electricana - and an East Coast showing of Lightfoot §lightfoot . Contact me if you are interested in one of the events, or a ride on a Lightfoot. I'm sure everyone at New York Climate Week NYCW will be talking about AI. Among other things I'll be talking about Electric Saul https://rewiringaustralia.org/electric-saul?utm source=es-landingpage&utm medium=website&utm campaign=416746974-Electric+Saul+-+recurring+support&utm content=%2Felectric-saul&sourcePage=%2Felectric-saul — the AI we built at Rewiring Australia in partnership with GOOGLE. Thanks GOOGLE. There are plenty of doom stories out there about AI. I don't believe most of them. In fact my own experience of AI is that it has really got quite good. I do physics and engineering and economic modelling with it and it’s incredible, and I'm building about one custom CAD app a week to enable the design of new things. I love it. I remember the AI classes I took at MIT 25 years ago, and we imagined one day people would build these things, so to see something writing complex software easily, and doing it with the user interface you'd expect on the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise, is pretty amazing. Of course, it is nowhere near what we would have called AI back then. Its machine learning. Machines doing an awesome job with statistics. I don’t think we need AGI and I’m not bullish on us achieving it . I’m pretty happy with a user interface to hardcore coding that isn’t a command line and a keyboard. Commodification of code might just be the democratization of code. There is more room here for optimism than doom. Don’t believe the hype. Electric Saul is an AI we trained specifically to help advise on household electrification. My kids think its “cringe”, but I believe in engaging with the new frontier. I've done hundreds of events and roadshows and am answering people's electrification questions all the time, and we've tried at Rewiring Australia to feed that knowledge and those FAQs Frequently Asked Questions into the machine so we can help more people on their climate journey. As Electric Saul himself says, real Saul needs to sleep and can't be everywhere at once. Uptake has been great, as has been the feedback. Evidence is that it is genuinely helping real people make good decisions about electrifying their lives. I hope to build the US version soon. For those of you who keep telling me you believe AI Saul needs to swear more, he probably does. I like the idea of trusted sources of information that can be engaged conversationally to help on electrification and decarbonisation. The future can be intimidating and electrification should be easy and cheap but we aren’t quite there yet so help… helps. The electrification AI can even be pushed pretty hard in my experience. I had it do thermal calculations on my house and on a hot tub I use as a thermal battery for my excess solar. I'm still quite amazed that it got all the answers right and recommended the right heat pump and operational window to minimise cost and maximise my solar. Lots of people ask about the energy cost and impact of all of these AIs. My opinion is that we will find enormous code efficiencies and the data centre build-out will be far, far smaller than the hyperventilating stock boosters say, which will put a cap on the resources it will use. We know for Electric Saul that a comprehensive conversation about household electrification costs about 30 cents to host. The climate impact of that 30c is less than spending 30c on petrol or gasoline, and probably about the same as spending 30c on a coffee. One day when it's all wind and solar and fusion power, and when we get serious about recycling, the impact can be zero. For that 30c though we can lock in thousands of dollars of savings per year and tonnes of carbon reduced per year in economic and climate impact. This AI isn’t coming for your job, its the type of AI you can imagine tradespeople and contractors using to demystify the things they are installing at your house. Go give it a try. https://rewiringaustralia.org/electric-saul?utm source=es-landingpage&utm medium=website&utm campaign=416746974-Electric+Saul+-+recurring+support&utm content=%2Felectric-saul&sourcePage=%2Felectric-saul It's just a start. I'm currently prototyping new tools to add to it that will include advocacy and even help selecting the lowest cost electricity plans available to you. A cheaper electricity plan is easier for my Australian readers than my American ones — which is one of the reasons why I'm going to NYCW Rewiring the World On Wednesday I'll be hosting an event on Rewiring the World. We have been busy building a toolbox for Electrifying Climate Action based on what we have learned at Rewiring America, Rewiring Australia, and Rewiring New Zealand. For the first time we will have all the Rewirings together in one place to showcase our various community, policy, regulatory and other advocacy achievements, and how we can use data tools to speed up this energy transition. It's a fundraiser to kick off more Rewiring efforts around the world to accelerate climate action. Rewiring the World. Wednesday, September 23, 10:00–11:30am ET. This will be an invitation only small event, so if you are keen, contact me. Pax Electricana I've been working with two incredible young people — Ricky Huang and Arpana Girithiran — on building an effort to speed up our industrial decarbonisation. Historically aluminium smelting has gone where electricity is cheap — such as Iceland, Canada, and the southern tip of New Zealand — where there is cheap hydroelectricity. For commodities like iron, cement, aluminium, fertilisers, copper, nickel, and others, we are going to need prolifically cheap like 2-3c/kWh electricity to make them at the same prices they can be made with fossil fuels. This will mean very fundamental shifts in where these commodities are processed, and how, including a whole host of exciting electro-chemical pathways. We are working on baselining what this looks like with MIT, Stanford, Columbia and other universities, and we are starting fundraising for the diplomatic and trade efforts that will be required to get these complex and expensive projects to happen. We are particularly excited about figuring out the knotty problems of first-of-a-kind demonstrations. This one is a public event, and you're welcome. Rethinking Energy Security: How Middle Powers Can Build a Pax Electricana https://columbiasocialenterprise.org/civicrm/event/register?reset=1&id=1093 . Thursday, September 24, 6:00–7:30pm, Cooperman Commons, Geffen 120, Columbia Business School. With Shanta Barley Real Zero Hub, IIASA , me, Amy Myers Jaffe NYU , and Amanda Wormald DCCEEW, the Australian Government's Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water , moderated by Gernot Wagner Columbia Business School . Co-presented by Pax Electricana with Columbia Business School's Climate Knowledge Initiative and the Tamer Institute. Dinner provided while it lasts. RSVP here. https://columbiasocialenterprise.org/civicrm/event/register?reset=1&id=1093 Lightfoot Lightfoot's https://lightfoot.solar/ first production run is finished and the first units have landed in America. We are trying to keep sales to limited geographic areas and are starting in the Bay Area. Early units are on the streets and owners and on-lookers are loving them. We'll have three in NYC for rides and photoshoots. If you are in NY this week and want a ride somewhere in the middle of the day, I'll come pick you up — drop me an email. If you are curious about getting one, I'll put you in touch with sales https://lightfoot.solar/ . What's next I've had my head down writing materials for my new book project on materials flow — STUFF — so expect an on-rush of that material. Also expect a bunch of Climate Week updates. I'm also increasingly intrigued by ways we can use AI for increased transparency in our democracies, so I'm feeling that will be a new component of this Substack. Energy, Transparency and Stuff? I had great success this week simulating pieces of the Australian electricity market that show pathways to lower costs for everyday people. I'll be excited to share that with you once I've made sure I'm not hallucinating or rather Claude . P.S. Subscribe to my mate Leah Stokes' new Substack, Notes from the Electric Era https://electricnotes.news/ . She is the best we have in terms of climate policy, she is tireless, and she has a new book — The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/828107/the-carbon-wave-by-leah-c-stokes/ — which I'm about to read. You should probably read it too. P.S.P.S. As a thought that I'll hopefully find time to expand on: I think this AI doomerism is the product of people who are sleep deprived and don't understand how sewage systems work. P.S.P.S.P.S. Rude people have told me that Electric Saul is thinner, buffer, and younger than the real Saul. Apparently people also wanted to have him be Saulty-er and swear more. Let me know your thoughts.