10 years ago, Australian inventor Saul Griffith wanted to show the world how much a person’s individual choices can affect the planet.
At a TED talk, he displayed a huge audit of his personal energy impact, calculating the carbon footprint of every action in his life down to his underwear, toilet paper and taxes.
The founder of a wind power company and a dedicated bicycle commuter, Griffith was ashamed to discover that he was consuming much more power than the average American.
Griffith’s San Francisco lab has attracted $100 million in capital from investors and spun out a dozen companies.
The 47-year-old has won MacArthur “genius” grant in 2007 for his prodigious inventions “in the global public interest,” from novel household water-treatment systems to an educational cartoon series for kids.
He has spent the last ten years working on a technological answer to climate change, and his proposal is mass electrification.
Griffith’s environmentalist beliefs began when he was a child. Family holidays when Griffith and his sister were growing up consisted of driving across the continent in an old Land Rover loaded with photography gear, visiting secluded islands, and swimming with turtles. His mother is a printer and wildlife artist, and his father is a retired professor.
While most environmentalists are targeting the fossil fuel sector, Griffith wants to decarbonize every home in the United States. Efforts to achieve net-zero carbon emissions will fall short unless this is done.
Otherlab, which Griffith co-founded more than a decade ago, is where the Australian and two dozen other scientists are trying to find a way to stop global warming.
One of the lab’s current studies involves completely rethinking offshore wind platforms.
Another group is working on a solar-powered scooter that will be released this year. They also devised a tracker device to aid solar panels in following the direction of the sun throughout the day.
Whereas many environmentalists see the world as doom and gloom, Griffith sees climate change as solvable and envisions a cleaner future that is better than what we have now.
Otherlab’s initiatives have received funding from the Advanced Research Laboratory of the US Department of Energy, the US Navy, and NASA.
Griffith has put together a diverse team for the job. Huang was a competitive snowboarder, and Von Clemm was a former ski instructor.
He’s also conducting tests on his own home, which is located south of Sydney. To store the excess electricity from his home’s experimental solar panels, he built a six-foot-tall cedar-clad hot tub in his yard.