Dr Saul Griffith has found himself in plenty of high-pressure situations over the past two decades. From meetings with White House officials and US politicians, to duelling with the powerful fossil fuel lobby, he's made the case for his solution to the climate crisis in forums where the stakes couldn't be higher.
But it was a Sunday afternoon meeting in a community centre just north of Wollongong that proved "the most intimidating one by far," he said. "You're my neighbours," Saul joked as he stood up to give his presentation. "If we screw up, you literally know where I live."
Originally from the suburbs of Sydney, Saul, 49, lived and worked in the US for over 20 years, where he recently helped politicians write "the largest piece of climate legislation in human history anywhere in the world," he says.
Having returned to live in Australia with his young family, he's now working on another ambitious plan: to see households in his own suburb of Austinmer — and those neighbouring it in the 2515 postcode area — "electrified" and converted to run on renewable energy.
"We have to electrify all the [household] machines," Saul told the packed meeting at the Thirroul community centre last September. "There is no other viable technology on the horizon to eliminate these emissions."
The plan is known as "Electrify 2515". It aims for all household machines in the postcode area running on fossil fuels — from gas cooktops to petrol cars — to be converted to electric equivalents and powered by renewable energy.
Inspired by Saul's ideas, a small group of local volunteers have been busily doorknocking their suburb and rallying the community to sign up to the Electrify 2515 pilot, which stands to be the first of its kind in Australia if it can get off the ground.
But Saul's mission is larger than just one suburb. He calls Electrify 2515 a "lighthouse project", a real-world test to illuminate a pathway out of the climate crisis.
"We're trying to do proof at scale, prove it in a community," he tells Australian Story. "Here's a community of real Australians living better than they did before with lower energy bills, they're healthier and they're zero emissions."
It might sound straightforward but it's not. Saul estimates it will take $20 million in funding "from a bunch of different sources" to cover the community's electrification costs. To get the project up and running, they need to raise money.
If it succeeds, those living along a thin strip of coast north of Wollongong could provide something rare in the global fight against climate change — a good news story Saul hopes communities around the world could emulate.
"People have always, since the beginning of time, been motivated by stories," Saul says. "I think being able to genuinely tell the story with real data that also paints a successful outcome for humans is incredibly important."
A man of many labels
He's been described as a disrupter, a compulsive optimist, a certified genius. The labels pile up. But there's one that Saul says he's happy to wear.
"I think of myself as an engineer," he says. "Engineers are people who like to use the tools of science to get a job done."
It's hard to deny there is an aura of eccentricity about him — bushy-bearded and often barefooted — as he sets about tackling arguably the world's most intractable problem brandishing charts and hand-drawn diagrams. But Saul cares little for what people think of how he looks — to him, it's only the ideas that count.
For Saul, the job at hand is to "electrify everything". It's a mantra that has come to define his proposed solution to the climate crisis.
"The next time you buy a stove, it has to be electric so you're not burning natural gas anymore," he explains. "The next time you buy a water heater or a space heater, they have to be electric, not natural gas. The next time you do your roof, you have to put solar, right?"
By Saul's reckoning, the US has 1 billion such machines (Australia has 100 million) in need of electrification, which together account for 42 per cent of the US economy's emissions.
"Forty-two per cent of emissions are decisions that you make around your kitchen table," he says. "What you fuel your car with, what you use to cook your food."
Saul's take on solving the climate crisis is unconventional, one that "inverts the paradigm," he says. While the public debate has often focused on structural economic changes, like shutting down coal mines or putting a tax on carbon, there's been less focus on the household or "end use" side of the equation.
Saul argues that for the drastic emission reductions the world needs to make within the decade, the only viable solution is to work with "technologies that we have now that you can buy off the shelf".
"We have to get 50 per cent reductions by 2030 for a climate target we want," he says. "It's 'go' time for the stuff that works."
'Free pizza and an unsupervised workshop'
There was only one "dirty word" in the Griffith family home in the south-west suburbs of Sydney where Saul grew up. "I would never tolerate children who said that they were bored," says his mother, Pamela Griffith.
Pamela is an artist and Saul's father was an academic in textiles engineering, "so our house was roughly one-half studio, roughly one-half workshop, with a kitchen and some bedrooms attached," Saul recalls.
It wasn't until many years later he realised his upbringing wasn't typical. But the days spent pulling cars apart in the garage with his dad – and then figuring out how to put them back together – gave Saul a "fearless approach" to problem-solving.
After moving to the US to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his 20s, he wound up in San Francisco, where he started Squid Labs with three windsurfing-obsessed MIT buddies. It was "a bucket of ideas that paid enough of a salary for us to figure out what we were doing and then create very focused start-ups," says Saul.
"I know that they chose the Bay Area partly because it was windy, and they were all avid kite surfers," says Saul's then-girlfriend, now-wife, Arwen.
On the weekends, they would tear around the bay tethered to massive experimental kites. They got the idea to harness the powerful winds at high altitudes to create green energy. "At the time, solar and wind were much more expensive than coal and gas," says Saul. "So how do you make them cheaper?"
Two years later, Saul started a company called Makani Power. With the help of a cash injection from Google, his team built and tested tethered autonomous "kites" which generated energy.
But when the financial crisis struck in 2008, the relationship with Google soured. "Saul ended up stepping down right as we had our first child," Arwen says. "So we literally had a newborn and Saul didn't have a job."
He founded another research and innovation lab in an old pipe organ factory. Otherlab is a "magical place" where ideas can be quickly turned into physical reality, says Saul. It's filed more than 50 patents and started a dozen technology companies, mostly in energy and robotics.
"Someone once asked me what innovation is and it was flippant at the time, but I think it's kind of what I believe now … It's free pizza and an unsupervised workshop."
"Saul has always worked with his hands," Arwen says. "I think that was where he initially tried to solve climate change." But that hands-on approach would soon take a back seat.
Saul helps rewire America, Australia next
In 2016, Saul convinced the US Department of Energy to fund Otherlab to conduct a study mapping the entire energy flow of the US economy, from where power is generated to where it's used: "your toasters and your cars and your ovens and your air conditioners," says Saul.
It made Saul ask questions about his own energy footprint, like how could you toast a slice of bread or drop your kids at school without using carbon dioxide? "The answer to nearly every single one of those questions is you have to electrify everything and power it with renewables," he says.
Armed with the hard data and a story to tell about electrification, Saul began plotting a new course.
"Before we got married, I said to Arwen, half as a joke, you know if by 2020 the world hasn't made sufficient progress on climate change, can I become an eco-terrorist? And she said, 'No'," Saul says.
What she did suggest was for him to work behind the scenes in politics to influence policy, laws and public opinion.
"And that's how Rewiring America came to be," Saul says.
In 2019, he started Rewiring America with his friend Alex Laskey, an entrepreneur with connections in the worlds of US business and politics.
"Saul and Alex are both very ambitious," Arwen says. "They both had experience with Silicon Valley, where billions of dollars get tossed around and I think they thought, if you can do that for an app, let's do it for the planet."
They soon discovered politicians were hungry for a good story to tell their constituents about lowering emissions and saving households money, as long as it was backed by rigorous data.
But they needed to do more than convince the politicians.
"I was politically naive," Saul says. "I thought that politicians write policy. I learned quickly that a lot of policy is drafted by lobbyists. And so to write policy in the US, we had to become a lobby group."
Ari Matusiak, a former special assistant to Barack Obama, joined Rewiring America in 2021 and got the group a "seat at the table" with the freshly minted Biden administration.
"Nobody was really showing up to write the legislation for the household, for the commercial sector, for the demand side," says Saul. "So we said we will fill that gap."
For 18 months, Rewiring America forged political and industry coalitions as the Biden administration's climate policy took shape. And they made some powerful enemies too. There was "hand-to-hand combat" with the oil and gas industry, says Saul. "We just relentlessly fought the science-based argument."
All the political wrangling and backroom brawling paid off. In August 2022, Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, an opaque title for his signature climate bill, which included measures for healthcare and tax reform.
"An enormous amount of the work that Rewiring America did ended up in the climate bill," says Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico who worked closely on the IRA. "Things like rebates are at the centre of that legislation."
According to Saul, the IRA "will spend about $US140 billion [$208 billion] helping American households electrify and decarbonise," with up to $US20,000 in tax incentives and rebates for households. "It will permanently transform the US energy market towards electrification," Saul says.
It was a rare political victory for the climate movement. In September, he flew to the US to meet President Biden and celebrate at a party on the White House lawn. "This was like the first party. And it was an intoxicating, joyous atmosphere. It was wonderful."
But already, his focus was turning to the possibilities in Australia.
The race to electrify a community
It was in far less salubrious surroundings that the plan for Electrify 2515 was hatched. "The first time we met Saul we sat down at the local pub on the, like, two-for-one schnitty night," recalls Francis Vierboom, one of the locals steering the Electrify 2515 project.
Francis was already engaged in climate activism when Saul moved into the area. He knew him as a "Silicon Valley type" who had been doing good things in the US.
At the pub, Saul suggested they form a group with the ambitious goal of becoming Australia's first all-electric community. "We all just latched straight on and said, 'Great! That is like, we can do that!'," Francis says.
Along with his wife Jessie and eight other locals, mostly parents with young families, they formed Electrify 2515 with the goal of signing up 500 of the postcode's 4,000 households to take part in the trial.
"We went into this having absolutely no idea if we were going to get 10 people willing to kind of take part," says Kristen McDonald, another member of the Electrify 2515 committee. "And we got 500 people within four days."
That number has now surpassed 1,500 households.
The group meets every few weeks in each other's homes to plan how to educate the community and convince more people to take part.
One of their aims is to prove that the power grid can handle the extra load of electrification. "We also want to be able to show the nation that this works and that this is actually an upgrade to your life," says Francis.
In his own home, Francis has already installed a heat pump hot water system, which uses about a third of the energy of a traditional heated element hot water system, and an induction cooktop. With a 10-kilowatt solar panel system on the roof, he says his power bills have now "switched into positive territory".
To fully electrify his home, he still has to install a home battery and convert the family car to an electric vehicle, both big-ticket items.
"So the up-front cost of doing all of these things at once is high and that's why we need to get a subsidy for this campaign to bring a lot of that forward," he says. "Once you've made these upgrades, it's all savings from there."
To find the money for the project, Saul has been going cap-in-hand to state and federal politicians and funding bodies.
The NSW government recently announced $8 million for up to three community electrification pilots, although the funds are not specifically for Electrify 2515.
"I think that the pilots are really important," says NSW Minister for Energy and Treasurer Matt Kean. "It's providing a proof of concept so it can debunk the criticisms of the naysayers and actually demonstrate real results in real-time. And then once you get it right in the pilot, then you can scale it more broadly."
Saul estimates that once the initial expense of electrification has been paid off, households could save $3,000 a year on their energy bills. And because they would no longer be beholden to the rising cost of fossil fuels, he argues energy costs would become inflation-proof.
"Because Australia has done so good on rooftop solar, the economics are extraordinary," he says. "So if we use our cheap sunshine to drive our cars and heat our homes, we're going to save money sooner."
Saul hopes they start to fully electrify homes in the pilot later this year. If it works, the community living along a small strip of coast between the ocean and the cliffs just north of Wollongong could show a way out of the climate crisis.
"Nobody wants to be a part of an unsuccessful climate movement," Saul says. "So it's like, what are the stories that are going to be magnetic and engaging enough that get us to success?"
Watch Australian Story The Transformer on ABC iview.
