A conversation with energy guru Amory Lovins

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All You Need Is Lovins A conversation with energy guru Amory LovinsBy

David Roberts 26 Jul 2007

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If politicians think in sound bites and intellectuals think in sentences,

Amory Lovins thinks in white papers. His speech is studded with pregnant pauses

-- you can almost hear the whirs and clicks as an enormous mass of statistics,

analyses, and aphorisms is trimmed and edited into a manageable length. I've

talked to experts who struggle to substantiate their answers. Lovins struggles

to leave things out.

 

Amory Lovins.

Photo: © Judy Hill

 

No one has done more to change the world of energy, both its intellectual

underpinnings and its real-world practice, than Lovins. Beginning with a seminal

Foreign Affairs article in 1976 -- " Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken? " which

introduced the " soft path " to energy -- Lovins shifted the focus from bigger to

smarter, from more to more-with-less. He's consulted with businesses,

governments, and militaries on how to achieve organizational goals using less

energy and less money. His books and articles are legion; the latest is Winning

the Oil Endgame, a " roadmap to getting the U.S. completely, attractively, and

profitably off oil. "

 

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the " think

and do tank " Lovins founded. The occasion will be celebrated in early August at

an event attended by, among others, Bill Clinton and New York Times columnist

Thomas Friedman.

 

I gave Lovins a call to check in on some of today's greatest energy challenges,

from biofuels to Iraq to a backwards-looking Congress.

 

 

 

 

 

After all you've done to shift the energy debate, why do supply-side

questions still dominate the discussion in Congress?

 

 

Congress is a creature of constituencies, and the money and power of the

constituencies are almost all on the supply side. There is not a powerful and

organized constituency for efficient use, and there's a very strong political

(but not economic) constituency against distributed power, particularly

renewables. So I would not pay too much attention to what Congress is doing. I'm

not saying it doesn't matter, but ultimately economic fundamentals govern what

will happen -- things that don't make sense, that don't make money, cannot

attract investment capital.

 

 

We see this now in the electricity business. A fifth of the world's

electricity and a quarter of the world's new electricity comes from micropower

-- that is, combined heat and power (also called cogeneration) and distributed

renewables. Micropower provides anywhere from a sixth to over half of all

electricity in most of the industrial countries. This is not a minor activity

anymore; it's well over $100 billion a year in assets. And it's essentially all

private risk capital.

 

 

So in 2005, micropower added 11 times as much capacity and four times as much

output as nuclear worldwide, and not a single new nuclear project on the planet

is funded by private risk capital. What does this tell you? I think it tells you

that nuclear, and indeed other central power stations, have associated costs and

financial risks that make them unattractive to private investors. Even when our

government approved new subsidies on top of the old ones in August 2005 --

roughly equal to the entire capital costs of the next-gen nuclear plants --

Standard & Poor's reaction in two reports was that it wouldn't materially

improve the builders' credit ratings, because the risks private capital markets

are concerned about are still there.

 

 

So I think even such a massive intervention will give you about the same

effect as defibrillating a corpse -- it will jump but it will not revive.

 

 

 

 

Does the same critique apply to liquid coal?

 

 

Yes. I was delighted when both the Chinese State Council and the U.S. Senate

about a week apart canceled [liquid coal] programs.

 

 

But I'm sure you're aware that the political push behind liquid coal is still

very much pushing.

 

 

Of course, including some people who should know better. It has fundamental

problems in economics, carbon, and water, and bearing in mind that we can get

the country completely off oil at an average cost of $15 a barrel, something in

the $50s to $70s range doesn't look viable. Those who invest in it, publicly or

privately, will lose their shirts, and deservedly so.

 

 

I think a good way to smoke out corporate socialists in free-marketeers'

clothing is to ask whether they agree that all ways to save or produce energy

should be allowed to compete fairly at honest prices, regardless of which kind

they are, what technology they use, where they are, how big they are, or who

owns them. I can tell you who won't be in favor of it: the incumbent

monopolists, monopsonists, and oligarchs who don't like competition and new

market entrants. But whether they like it or not, competition happens. It's

particularly keen on the demand side.

 

 

Will Big Coal fall on its face?

 

 

It's already clearly happening in the global marketplace -- although the U.S.

lags a bit, having rather outmoded energy institutions and rules. Worldwide,

less than half of new electrical services are coming from new central power

plants. Over half are coming from micropower and negawatts, and that gap is

rapidly widening. The revolution already happened -- sorry if you missed it.

 

 

How might your notion of " brittle power " apply, not to developed countries

but to countries that are developing in conditions in which resilience is at a

premium? Iraq is the obvious example.

 

 

Some of us have made three attempts at [bringing decentralized power to Iraq]

and there's a fourth now under discussion. The first three attempts, the third

of which was backed by the Iraqi power minister, were vetoed by the U.S.

political authorities on the grounds that they'd already given big contracts to

Bechtel, Halliburton, et. al to rebuild the old centralized system, which of

course the bad guys are knocking down faster than it can be put back up.

 

 

How could Iraq have played out differently?

 

 

If you build an efficient, diverse, dispersed, renewable electricity system,

major failures -- whether by accident or malice -- become impossible by design

rather than inevitable by design, an attractive nuisance for terrorists and

insurgents. There's a pretty good correlation between neighborhoods with better

electrical supply and those that are inhospitable to insurgents. This is well

known in military circles. There's still probably just time to do this in

Afghanistan.

 

 

Meanwhile, about a third of our army's wartime fuel use is for generator sets,

and nearly all of that electricity is used to air-condition tents in the desert,

known as " space cooling by cooling outer space. " We recently had a two-star

Marine general commanding in western Iraq begging for efficiency and renewables

to untether him from fuel convoys, so he could carry out his more important

missions. This is a very teachable moment for the military. The costs, risks,

and distractions of fuel convoys and power supplies in theater have focused a

great deal of senior military attention on the need for not dragging around this

fat fuel-logistics tail -- therefore for making military equipment and

operations several-fold more energy efficient.

 

 

I've been suggesting that approach for many years. Besides its direct benefits

for the military mission, it will drive technological refinements that then help

transform the civilian car, truck, and plane industries. That has huge leverage,

because the civilian economy uses 60-odd times more oil than the Pentagon does,

even though the Pentagon is the world's biggest single buyer of oil (and of

renewable energy). Military energy efficiency is technologically a key to

leading the country off oil, so nobody needs to fight over oil and we can have

" negamissions " in the Gulf. Mission unnecessary. The military leadership really

likes that idea.

 

 

Do you think that individual changes in behavior can or will have substantial

effect on the energy situation?

 

 

Yes, of course. People will vote with their wallets as well as their ballots,

in a way that will affect the political system and even more the private sector,

which is quite good at selling what you want and not selling what you don't buy.

The interplay between business and civil society is even more important than

between business and government, and that is where I want to continue to focus

most of my effort. I admire those who try to reform public policy, but I don't

spend much time doing that myself. In a tripolar world of business, civil

society, and government, why would you want to focus on the least effective of

that triad?

 

 

Reports out recently cast doubt on the environmental advantages of biofuels.

Have you ever reconsidered your support for them?

 

 

You're treating biofuels as generic and I don't think that's appropriate.

There are much smarter and much dumber approaches to biofuels, and biofuels do

not need to have the problems you refer to.

 

 

But even cellulosic ethanol has come under criticism lately.

 

 

Not from anyone knowledgeable that I'm aware of. Unless of course you need

such large quantities of it, because you have such inefficient vehicles, that

you start getting in land-use trouble.

 

 

We suggest that U.S. mobility fuels could be provided without displacing any

food crops. You could do it just with switchgrass and the like on conservation

reserve land. Being a perennial, which can even be grown in polyculture,

switchgrass and its relatives would hold the soil better because they're much

deeper rooted than the shallow-rooted annuals with which that erosion-prone land

is often planted. And of course the perennials don't need any cultivation or

other inputs.

 

 

Just a few weeks ago my colleagues and I led the redesign of a cellulosic

ethanol plant -- we were able to cut out very large fractions of its energy and

capital need by designing it differently. There are other process innovations

we're aware of that would achieve similar results. I would not write off

biofuels at all.

 

 

Now, your broader point: Should it not be part of an integrated spectrum of

efforts? Yes, of course. We can triple the efficiency of our cars and light

trucks without compromised performance and with better safety, and we could

also, if we want to get really conservative, stop subsidizing and mandating

sprawl so we'd have less of it.

 

 

The automotive revolution alone has a number of steps you could do in whatever

order you'd like. In round numbers, if you take a really good hybrid and drive

it properly, -- not the way Consumer Reports says to -- you roughly double its

efficiency. If you make it ultra-light and ultra-low-drag, you roughly redouble

its efficiency. Now you're using a quarter the oil per mile you were before. If

you then run it on, say, properly grown cellulosic E85, you quadruple its oil

efficiency per mile again -- you're using a 16th the oil per mile that you

started with. If you make it a good plug-in hybrid and have a good economic

model to pay for the batteries -- some of those are starting to emerge -- then

you at least double efficiency again. Now you're down to about 3 percent the oil

per mile you started with. And of course there are also renewable-electricity

battery-electric cars. There are some sensible and profitable ways to do

hydrogen, to displace the last bit of oil or

biofuel, and there are other options like algal oils that are becoming very

interesting. It's a rather rich menu, and you don't need all of it to get

largely or completely off oil and make money on the deal.

 

 

Do you think private transportation will remain dominant for the foreseeable

future or will there eventually be a shift to public transportation --

high-speed rail, etc.?

 

 

We can do a lot better in that regard, with policy and technical innovation,

and there are many countries that already do. But with the settlement patterns

we have in the United States, it's difficult to make a large shift in a short

time in that regard. It's much easier to make the cars, trucks, and planes three

times more efficient, and that has respective paybacks of two years, one year,

and four or five years with present technology.

 

 

In your work, to what extent do you think about quality of life, or

happiness, as opposed to providing the material goods we now consume more

efficiently?

 

 

A lot. It isn't our main analytic focus, but of course every thoughtful

citizen has to ask about the purposes of the economic process. As Donella

Meadows reminded us, it is silly and futile to try to meet nonmaterial needs by

material means. If we're not careful in what we do, and how we decide, and in

who decides, we can end up with outer wealth and inner poverty.

 

 

Thanks again, and congratulations on 25 years.

 

 

 

 

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