How reducing electricity bills in Hong Kong could be part of climate solution

If you were to ask me to cast a spell to fix climate change, the magic words would be “electrify everything.”

We don’t need to sacrifice all of the comforts of the 21st century to achieve carbon neutrality. We can continue to enjoy a high quality of life by using electrical gadgets powered by green electricity instead of fossil fuels.

Not a small undertaking, and one which will require more than a magic spell to achieve, but solving electrification will be a huge step towards solving climate change.

Electricity is amazing. Compared to fossil fuels, which waste most of their energy as heat, electricity is much more effective at doing useful work.

Electric tools are often quieter than their combustion-powered counterparts. And electric machines don’t generate air pollution at their point of use.

Not every technology today has an electric counterpart, but when there is, the electric version is often a superior technology in its own right.

Given my last article, it is probably unwise for me to sing the praises of electric cars. Therefore, by way of example, let me sing the praises of a different technology instead. 

When cooking with a gas stove, some of the flame heats the pan. Most of it escapes into the kitchen. That means most of the energy from the gas you have paid for is wasted in heating the kitchen, which in turn means you need to pay more for air conditioning. Oh, and the combustion gases are toxic.

An induction stove, on the other hand, cleverly uses magnetic fields to heat the pan without bleeding heat to the rest of the kitchen. Much less energy is wasted, so more of the electrical energy you have paid for goes into the cooking.

My own gas and electricity bills have gone down since installing one. Apart from saving money, I’m happy with it because it is faster to get to the boil, and its glass surface is much easier to clean compared to a fiddly gas hob. 

Induction stoves do have some downsides, but in most kitchens, they represent as much of an advance over gas as gas was over dung fires.

Having sung the praises of electrification, it’s good news that Hong Kong is reducing the price of electricity. After all, a big blocker for rolling out more electrification in the UK is that electricity prices are higher than gas prices.

In green energy’s defence, that’s not because renewables are expensive – they are in fact the cheapest form of generation – but because of a quirk in the pricing mechanism, which means that expensive gas sets the wholesale price of electricity. 

Making electricity cheaper is an important factor in increasing electricity demand and perhaps even convincing consumers to make the leap to these better technologies. But that’s only half the picture.

It’s also important to ensure that the electrical energy demand displaces fossil fuel demand rather than just being added on top of it. There’s no climate win if people are using just as much gas as before, but sprinkling on some cheap and dirty electricity on top. 

We should take another important factor into account: Electrification is only a climate solution when the electricity itself is green. Otherwise, it is just displacing pollution to dirty power plants.

And in Hong Kong, where 60 per cent of carbon emissions come from mostly fossil fuel electricity generation, the energy that powers the electricity must become cleaner.

I applaud the effort to reduce people’s cost of living by holding electricity bills low, which is not only important to improve people’s quality of life, but is also vitally important to get the social buy-in to swap gas for electricity.

If that low-cost electricity can be used as a stepping stone to encourage people to switch to efficient, magically futuristic electrotech, powered by renewables, that’s a vitally important double win. Abracadabra.