In the fast-expanding world of renewable energy, an articulate and enterprising ideas man named Saul Griffith is a rock star, and he’s coming to Hobart.
Go-karts, oddball cars, all manner of tools and gadgetry, quirky engineering and nifty science are a big part of a life remarkable for its ceaseless energy and exploration. But beyond being a gadget man, Griffith cares about the world and the people he shares it with.
His life is marked by a deep love of nature informed by physical and life sciences, and strong family and community connections inspiring a passion for the arts. STEM education, he says, should be STEAM, including A for art (or the arts). I couldn’t agree more.
Griffith’s action-packed career has taken him from a University of Sydney engineering degree in 2000 to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering PhD (subject: self-replicating machines) before he co-founded a technology company called OtherLab. That set the scene for a dozen or so tech startups exploring the potential for various high-tech inventions.
At OtherLab he painstakingly put together a vast map of the hugely complex flow of energy through the US economy – a project that would inform his life-long response to climate change, or as he calls it, “the existential crisis that will define this century”. That campaign, first in the US and now in Australia, is marked by his belief that with the help of electricity humanity can thread the climate needle.
Griffith’s inspiration and learning, and his first book, Electrify, helped fire up Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar clean energy program, injecting federal funds into all manner of local and regional actions to use electrical energy to help wean the US off fossil fuels.
In 2022, when he and his family moved to Australia to live, he began to apply the same thinking to Australia’s response to climate change. Griffith’s electrification ideas have informed government programs to foster uptake of EVs and solar and wind energy and to radically upgrade the nation’s electricity grid. He’s had a similar influence in New Zealand.
You can dive deeper into Griffith’s thinking at his Substack site, Energy and Stuff (energyandstuff.substack.com). Or you can buy one of his books for general readers explaining among other things why he’s essentially an optimist about our future. The latest of these is Plug In! The Electrification Handbook, detailing how electricity can help us defang the climate tiger.
In the coming week you can hear from the man himself at a couple of events in southern Tasmania. From 3 pm next Sunday he’ll be at the Kingston Community Hub, and on Monday at 6pm he’ll deliver the 29th annual Richard Jones Memorial Lecture at the University of Tasmania’s Stanley Burbury Theatre, part of the university’s “Island of Ideas” series of public talks.
At Kingston he will join another rock star, gardening guru Hannah Moloney, to discuss actions to secure a better future. The event is being organised by Kettering-based Net Zero Channel, which has played a leading role across southern Tasmania in raising awareness of the need to transition to clean energy, the benefits of better-insulated homes, and possibilities offered by home and community renewable energy and sustainable living projects.
Transport, which costs Tasmanians over $1 billion a year for petrol and diesel, will be part of the Kingston discussion. Then on Tuesday next week from 7 pm the Australian Electric Vehicle Association (Tasmania) will host a Zoom meeting open to all.
On the subject of pure science, it was good to see an Australian, Richard Robson from the University of Melbourne, among the three winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Chemistry last week for their blue-sky study of structures called metal organic frameworks – work that could have enormous ramifications for the containment of climate change.
MOFs are molecular structures capable of harvesting water from desert air, capturing carbon dioxide and storing toxic gases, among many other things. The prize recognises the trio’s groundbreaking research and its potential in addressing challenges arising in a changing climate.
The irony would be lost on the US president, but in the week of Donald Trump’s brazen but unsuccessful campaign to secure the Nobel Peace Prize, US institutions in his crosshairs to lose government funding, notably the University of California, figured prominently in Nobels for research in scientific fields.
Charting our future will demand high-quality (and therefore well-funded) education in STEM – science, technology, engineering and maths – as well as a grounding in the creative arts, as Griffith makes a point of reminding us. That is a lesson all leaders too easily ignore.