My search for a gallon of electricity
What if we understood storing electricity as well as we understand a gallon of gas?
Welcome to My Next Electric, a newsletter about the future of energy and going electric.
Investing in EVs, solar & storage @ The Batteries Included Fund
Vehicle design and grid integration @ Night Shift Bikes
How it all works & what to do about it @ My Next Electric
Today, it’s a preview of Cohort 9 and the quest for energy & electrification intuition!
My free course on energy and electrification starts March 11/12!
Here’s a quick trailer…
We have a few more spots left, so get over there before we sell out!
ISO: Deeper energy storage intuition
What’s different this time around is my obsession with building what Brian Potter calls “energy intuition.” I want to understand electricity as well I understand gasoline — especially when it comes to storing it in the power grid, my vehicles and my home.
Our world’s been running on gasoline for more than a century, so most of us get it. A gallon of gas? Cool. I know how much that is, how much it costs, where to get it, and how far it’ll get me down the road in different types of vehicles.
I don’t have that level of understanding on electricity. Watt the hell is a watt? Amp hour? Kilowatt? Joule? Calorie? Mega, Peta, Tera, Kilo? OMG.
I’d love to have an electrical equivalent of a gallon of gas - a unit of measure that lets me engage with the energy I need to do my modern life.
Iphone Sankey - the video game
One way to get there is to start with the one battery we know the best — the one in our smartphone. The scale here isn’t anywhere near what I’m proposing as our gallon of electricity - the kilowatt hour - but maybe we can work our way up from here.
We’ll test a simple game that Claude 3.7 and I built to follow that 1/100 of a Kilowatt Hour of energy you have in your phone all the way through the power grid.
From there we can get to a kilowatt — our electrical gallon — and from there to the grid itself. Here are some early hunches on these three categories of storage and how we’ll need to engage with each as we electrify more and more.
Small energy storage: Watt hours (10 for a phone charge). Most of this will be abstracted away because it’s small enough to disappear.
Medium energy storage: Kilowatt hours (our new gallon of electricity) As much as folks say we’ve got to make this so easy that nobody worries about it, let’s be honest — the gasoline machines we use require quite a bit of working knowledge. We’ve all had to learn about engine parts, oil changes, and service intervals. The scale and cost of energy we need to jam in our vehicles and appliances - no matter what form it is in — is too big to have it abstracted away. I’m proposing we find something easy to use and start getting used to measuring with it.
Large energy storage: Quads (one quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs), aka 293 Billion Kilowatt hours). Yes, it’s a pain to switch over to a totally different scale, but for now we’re going to beef up on the Quad since it’s what most folks use to measure grid-scale power (see the colorful Sankey below).
2 shout outs
I’ve been leaning on the work of two smart, thoughtful people while prepping for this new cohort. They deserve a shout out:
Brian Potter for a creative take on the popular Sankey diagram.
To Saul Griffith for the 1 Billion Machines that grid runs on.
Sign up now if you’re curious
If you’re still on the fence about this free, fun course, here’s a quick summary and a final nudge.
2 live sessions — 2 teams will run side-by-side in the 2nd & 3rd weeks of March.
Team N — Uptown New Orleans: Tuesday, March 11 & 18, 4-530P
Team Z — Zoom: Wednesday, March 12 & 19, 12-1P
2 weeks of office hours — I’ll host office hours for 2 weeks after that. Workshop anything: the grid, AI, EVs, bikes, your home, policy, investing.
Weekdays: March 20-Apr 7
Timing based on your input
Optional
Graduation — April 8. Silly awards, cheaper trophies.
April 8, 4-530P
Team Z dials in; N shows up.
Optional
By April 8th, you’ll:
get how the grid works and how it’s changing
the impact of AI, resiliency, electrification & renewables
know how to go electric when it makes sense for you
EVs, heat pumps, induction, solar+storage
be a bonafide energynerd.
Get over to mynextelectric.com and join us! And thanks to the dozens of readers who’ve signed up!