Saul Griffith is a documented genius, an upcoming influence President Biden, Otherlabs, Rewiring America and his latest "must read" book. Both videos help tell Saul's great story and show the top retracting!
According to Ms. Bronwyn Adcock, after advising US president Joe Biden on energy, Saul Griffith is back in Australia to declare war on the climate crisis.
It is late morning at the home of inventor, entrepreneur and CEO, Saul Griffith, in the coastal village of Austinmer, south of Sydney, and the scene is instantly familiar. Beach towels and children’s shoes are strewn by the front door; rogue socks and pieces of Lego line the stairwell; breakfast dishes are stacked on the sink: all signs of a household still in the throes of making the lurching transition from the languor of summer holidays to the routines of school term time – right down to the jar of negative rapid antigen Covid tests on the counter. Griffith and his wife, Arwen, apologise: in the morning hubbub – two children off to school, one starting high school – they momentarily forgot I was coming. The only clue that this is the home of one of this generation’s most brilliant inventors – in 2007 Griffith, who has a masters in engineering from the University of Sydney and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, known in the Unites States as a “genius grant” – is on the table tennis table, where what looks to be a skateboard hotted-up with an electric motor, sits partially assembled. “I’m messing around, I have voided the warranty on a whole bunch of electronics on that table tennis table,” Griffith confesses. “It won’t be legal anywhere in the world to use that skateboard.”
Nowadays, any “physical tinkering” Griffith does is “more for therapy” than anything else. Having founded numerous successful clean-tech companies in the US, where he’s lived for the past two decades, and still supervising his office in San Francisco – overseeing a team of 50 people working on commercialising clean technology products – he’s recently shifted the bulk of his professional life towards advocating another approach to the climate crisis. We have to decarbonise this demand side … or it doesn’t add up Saul GriffithIn 2020, Griffith co-founded a non-profit called Rewiring America, which, supported by extensive modelling and costing, advocates the mass electrification of homes. Petrol cars swapped for electric vehicles (EVs), gas heaters replaced by reverse-cycle air conditioners, gas cooktops replaced by induction – with the electricity that powers these devices coming from either renewable sources or nuclear power. (Griffith doesn’t think Australia needs nuclear power – we have enough renewables.)
Saul Griffith's latest creation is Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future.
Similar to Saul's converted 1961 Continental, this was a project we recently covered and shows the ingenuity of that era!
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