For half a century, Amory Lovins has put forth imaginative ideas aimed at encouraging society to consume energy more wisely, using less energy when possible and generating it ethically and sustainably when it has to be produced.
He and the organization he helped found, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), have put forth a constant stream of energy-saving ideas and designs for industry, for huge commercial buildings, for urban planning and even single family homes.
His approach has emphasized reduced cost as one major benefit of energy savings, but more recently, he has also extolled its benefit to the climate.
Lovins, 75, spoke last week at Livermore’s Bankhead Theater as part of the Rae Dorough Speaker Series.
He is currently teaching classes on energy efficiency at Stanford University as an adjunct professor.
He still has responsibilities at RMI, serving as chief scientist and chairman emeritus. He is author of more than 30 books and hundreds of technical papers, and the recipient of a very large number of U.S. and foreign awards for his energy efficiency research.
“Saved energy is the world’s biggest energy source,” he told the audience. “We doubled renewables (energy output), but that had 28 times less cumulative impact than the savings.”
He noted that renewable energy generators like solar and wind “get practically all the headlines because they’re visible,” but “the energy you don’t use” is almost unimaginably greater in scope.
Saving energy benefits the climate
As a climate benefit, he said, from 2014 through 2016 “the world’s saved energy avoided more than three times as much carbon dioxide (greenhouse gas) as all the renewable and nuclear growth did.”
His early interests were on the outdoors as much as on energy. In the 1960s, he worked as a mountain guide while photographing outdoor scenery and writing about conservation issues. He published his first book, “World Energy Strategies,” at the time of the energy crisis brought on by the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
He and his wife, Hunter Lovins, founded the Rocky Mountain Institute in Western Colorado in 1982, calling it a “think and do tank.” The terminology reflects the Institute’s plan not only to offer new ideas, but also to develop designs and technologies for carrying them out.
Speaking at the Bankhead, Lovins cited his home in the Rocky Mountains as a demonstration laboratory for what is possible in energy savings on a small scale.
At 7,100 feet, despite winter temperatures that can plunge far below zero, the home requires no combustion-based heating, he said. Warmth is sustained almost entirely by passive means such as “super insulation” and “big super-windows that insulate like 16 or 22 sheets of glass but look like 2 and cost less than 3.”
He said the financial savings realized by not installing and operating a furnace exceeds the added costs of the windows and insulation.
The house has had an influence far beyond local efficiency, he said, since it “helped inspire several hundred thousand European passive buildings with – like ours – no heating and roughly normal construction costs.”
In addition, comparable building designs have proved effective “in hot muggy climates like Bangkok’s.”
In general, he said, the advantages of investing in infrastructure are overrated and those of smart design are underrated.
Financially, cutting electrical demand through design changes brings “tremendous benefits.” Reducing demand requires “roughly a thousand-fold less capital and recovers it 10 times faster.”
Moving rapidly through detailed slides, he outlined one approach after another to saving energy through innovative design. A few examples:
* Most electricity runs motors. “Half goes to pumps and fans” that push some product through pipes and ducts.
The process is highly inefficient, with 90% of the energy generated in a power plant lost through inefficiencies that compound as the product completes its journey. By contrast, he said, thoughtful design of pipes and ducts can reduce 80-90% of the friction that inhibits flow and forces pumps to work hard.
“If done everywhere, (thoughtful design) could save about a fifth of the world’s electricity.”
RMI’s approach is to reverse the usual design, combining big pipes with small pumps instead of small pipes with big pumps. Pipes are laid out first to make sure of low-friction flow using approaches like eliminating elbows to reduce the need for powerful pumps.
* Weight reduction can make cars “several fold more efficient even before they’re electrified.” Lovins has owned a lightweight carbon fiber electric car for 9 years. The expensive carbon fiber material was “paid for by needing fewer batteries to propel the lighter weight car,” with fewer batteries needing less electricity purchased for recharging.
The car’s assembly takes less energy and time than a normal car, he said, with no need for the cost of repainting and some other maintenance. “Its quadrupled efficiency, at 124 mpg, comes without compromise and with many driver advantages.”
* The electrical industry is evolving rapidly as “powerful disruptors” force change “faster than most utility cultures can cope.”
Disruptors include the growth of wind power, photovoltaics that have rapidly become inexpensive, a revolution in lighting technology and the development of cheap, reliable batteries.
Renewable energy scales up in a “fundamentally different way” than “giant, cathedral-like power plants, which cost billions of dollars and take many years to license and build.”
Today, he said, an investment that might have built a giant power plant in the past can build a solar cell factory that produces each year thereafter enough solar cells to generate … as much electricity as the power plant ultimately would. So solar output worldwide is scaling faster than cellphones.”
While most of his talk discussed the kinds of energy efficiency issues he has worked on at RMI and now teaches at Stanford, Lovins responded to an audience question about local controversies, like the proposed 347-acre North Livermore Valley solar farm project.
He described it as “a controversy that pits our desire for solar energy against our need for open space.
Without addressing the legalities of a case now in court, he said one general solution is to “use the electricity efficiently,” implying minimizing the need for a large installation.
Another, “if you want to build solar big,” is to “put it in places that don’t sacrifice important community values…there are things called wires you can use to move the electricity” from distant, less sensitive sites.
He cited recent efforts by Stanford University to “go all solar” but making sure to “put solar (panels) in places that are not so sensitive.”
He cited parking lots, canals and rooftops as examples of places not likely to provoke controversy.
Geopolitics and the end of an era
Beyond the standard measures of business success, the world’s rapidly evolving energy scene is intertwined with some of the day’s great geopolitical currents, Lovins believes.
He is the descendant of Ukrainian grandparents, many of whose Jewish relatives were murdered by the Nazis in 1941. He mentioned “Putin’s war” in Ukraine repeatedly.
He believes that Putin is “blowing up the fossil fuel era” by forcing Europe and the rest of the world to find more reliable ways to obtain and save energy.
During the first two weeks of the war, western countries bought more than $8 billion worth of Russian oil and gas, he recently told the UK Guardian.
That is changing rapidly. “Putin’s war has triggered a European and American led response likely to trigger a steep decline” in fossil fuel use, he told the Bankhead audience.
“Putin has set inexorably in motion all the outcomes he dreaded,” speeding the end of the fossil fuels that underpin his power.
“If we grasp this unique opportunity, as Europe is now doing with impressive focus and resolve, then Ukraine’s agony will not have been in vain.”