CORRESPONDENCE
CALIFORNIA DREAMING Had William Tucker interviewed me before claiming I caused the California electricity mess ("California Unplugged," TAS, April 2001), he could have avoided embarrassing...
...I'm anxious to hear what the governors of Nevada and Arizona have to say about this "freeloading" charge...
...m Lovins calls the 21 percent higher demand during one hour of May a "meaningless fluke...
...We interviewed the vice president in the same offices I had visited when George Bush was vice president...
...So what...
...The central thermal power stations Tucker favors are seldom ordered anymore in competitive market economies, because onsite and local generation is cheaper, faster, lower-risk, more benign, and more reliable.Anyone who knows the field will instruct him that the transition to smaller plants is irreversibly underway, driven not by ideology but by market economics...
...CALIFORNIA DREAMING Had William Tucker interviewed me before claiming I caused the California electricity mess ("California Unplugged," TAS, April 2001), he could have avoided embarrassing himself and misleading your readers...
...Doubters are welcome to finance giant nuclear or coal plants and lose their shirts...
...Naturally I was reassured to meet Secret Service agents who did not have me on a list of potential threats to the president, but then I was equally reassured to have a president who was not a threat to the Constitution and to the White House intern program's morals...
...Two-thirds of the competitive bidding space was held by seven firms, each of which could move the market...
...I did talk with Karl Rabago on his staff...
...Combined with the equally compelling trend of miniaturization (we're currently shrinking both electronic and mechanical technology by a factor of 5.6 per linear dimension per decade), it is reasonable to conclude that technologies such as nanobots are inevitable within a few decades...
...Electricity, yes...
...Half the state's power plants didn't suddenly disappear...
...They write, for example, that "there are, to date, no nanobots," and go on to cast doubt on their feasibility...
...the CEC's Website reports 0.94 percent...
...m Lovins wonders why "a system that had readily met a peak load of 53 GW in summer 1999 could suffer rolling blackouts at 29 GW in winter 2000/2001...
...and the peak hour for all of 2000 (adding back voluntary curtailments) was 0.15 percent lower than the peak hour in 1999...
...Tucker falsely blames me for that result-which was avoided by the municipal utilities that continued to follow my suggested path...
...Most astonishing was Lovins's assertion that the California crisis is being caused by the "freeloading" of other states on the Western grid.These states (Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Washington, Colorado) provide California with 20 percent of its electricity.Yet according to Lovins, the crisis exists because these states haven't done as much as California in pursuing his conservation-and-renewables strategy...
...I regret I was unable to reach Lovins until after the article went to press...
...First, Tucker believes Internet growth is causing electricity demand to soar...
...Wrong again...
...According to the CEC, consumption of electricity in California grew 1 percent from 19901995 and 14 percent from 1995-2000...
...The impact of these interacting and accelerating revolutions is significant in the short term (i.e., over years), but revolutionary in the long term (i.e., over decades...
...In short, peak loads changed little in 2000...
...they were still there, but many were calling in sick-not always, it seems, legitimately...
...California has added population equal to the state of Connecticut since 1990 but built no major power plants...
...He can quote statistics and fudge figures until everyone is blue in the 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 face, yet none of his observations have any bearing on reality...
...Power companies can't eliminate demand by correcting for the weather...
...The CEC Website says total state consumption of electricity grew from 244,510 GWh in 1998 to 252,800 GWh in 1999, an increase of 3.4 percent...
...They both talk of the issues facing list of potential threats to the president, but then I was equally reassured to have a president who was not a threat to the Constitution and to the White House intern program's morals...
...m Lovins says the "weather-corrected average monthly demand" in 2000 didn't increase that much...
...RAY KURZWEIL, VIA THE INTERNET THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 23 t was a balmy bright day when my colleague Richard Vigilante and I trundled through the White House's northwest gate, up the drive, past the waiting camera crews, and into the West Wing to interview Vice President Dick Cheney...
...One day Lovins's Soft Energy Paths will merit a chapter in the revised edition of Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds...
...NANOBOTICS Fundamentally, George Gilder and Richard Vigilante and I share a deeply critical reaction to Bill Joy's prescription of relinquishment of "our pursuit of certain types of knowledge" ("Stop Everything...It's Techno-Horror," TAS, March 2000).Just as George Soros attracted attention by criticizing the capitalist system of which he was a primary beneficiary, the credibility ofJoy's treatise on the dangers of future technology has been enhanced by his reputation as a primary architect of contemporary technology...
...He also claims 12 percent electricity consumption growth in Silicon Valley in 2000...
...Here are a few examples: m Lovins says "the state's per capita (my emphasis) use of electricity...has stayed about flat for a quarter-century [and] was up at most 0.3 percent from 1990 to 2000...
...It's not a fluke to the people who have to meet that demand...
...Having the same firms build more plants will only give them more capacity to withhold and no less reason to do so...
...I'm a long-standing fan and practitioner of market mechanisms...
...He says state electricity demand grew 8 percent in 1999...
...Tucker claims "both California's and the nation's energy consumption figures belie" this...
...Although I agree with Gilder and Vigilante's opposition to the essentially totalitarian nature of the call for relinquishment of broad areas of the pursuit of knowledge and technology, their article directs a significant portion of its argument against the technical feasibility of the dangers.This is not the best strategy in my view to counter Joy's thesis.We don't have to look further than today to see that technology is a double-edged sword...
...The peak hour in May 2000 did have 21 percent higher demand than the peak hour in May 1999, but that's a meaningless fluke...
...He has actually managed to convince a sizable portion of the population that they can have all the electricity they want out of thin air-windmills and sunshine...
...But the general population remains unconvinced.The latest polls show that two-thirds of the people in California still believe there is no real electricity shortage in the state and that the whole crisis is a conspiracy rigged by the power companies...
...Neither do California's data...
...capacity to make it, no...
...Still, it's hard to see where Lovins is getting his figures...
...Power companies don't build plants for per capita consumption...
...We interviewed the vice president in the same offices I had visited when George Bush was vice president...
...But Gilder, as the author of two outstanding books (Microcosm and Telecosm) that document the exponential growth of diverse technologies, recognizes that these trends are not likely to stop anytime soon...
...Using them properly is a key part of California's energy solution...
...the same for all of 2000, "The Internet's tiny use of electricity isn't just my claim...
...Botched restructuring, concentrated market power, and strategic bidding made it more profitable for those dominant suppliers to sell less electricity at a higher price than to sell more at a lower price...
...They both talk of the issues facing...
...Lovins's conservation-and-renewables theory is a study in the power of historical mythmaking...
...Lovins says the CEC Website reports 0.94 percent...
...Governor Gray Davis has been chastened...
...Tucker also seems to have some data source unavailable to the rest of us...
...WILLIAM TUCKER RESPONDS: Amory Lovins's response is proof that there is no real knowledge without practical application...
...it's an irrefutable, carefully measured fact...
...I said state demand grew 8 percent in 1999...
...the CEC reports 3.1 percent in 1999 and 3.6 percent in 2000.The "server farms" he might have in mind use less-probably much less-than 1.6 percent of Bay Area and 0.2 percent of U.S...
...Some of my figures for demand growth, based on press reports, were probably exaggerated...
...These highly successful and profitable policies didn't cause the crisis and, if continued, would have forestalled it...
...I'm not talking about routine sloppiness...
...As to my role in the fiasco, I acknowledge having long urged and helped California to pursue the best buys firsttypically efficient use of electricity, then cost-effective cogeneration and renewables...
...Sorry, but the national data, which he doesn't cite, show no "Internet effect" whatever...
...Tucker doesn't ask why a system that had readily met a peak load of 53 GW (53 billion watts) in summer 1999 could suffer rolling blackouts at 29 GW in winter 2000-01...
...The state's per-capita use of electricity, which he claims jumped after 1996, has stayed about flat for a quarter-century, and according to the data on the California Energy Commission's Website, was up at most 0.3 percent from 1990 to 2000 (actually down using the 2000 Census's population data...
...California's electrical consumption during the '90s grew with its population, but at an average rate of only 1.15 percent per year, half as fast as the economy grew...
...AMORY B. LOVINS, CEO (RESEARCH) ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE, SNOWMASS, COLO...
...The answer is because California utilities traditionally ship power north to Oregon and Washington for heating during the winter months in exchange for importing power during the air-conditioning season...
...As a March 11 San Francisco Chronicle feature pointed out, the average of daily peaks in May 2000 was up 12.8 percent over a year earlier...
...The weather-corrected average monthly peak in 2000 was up less than 1 percent, and for July through September, it was below 1999's...
...The big problem is a chain of serious errors in fact and logic...
...It's not, and demand isn't soaring...
...I believe that the most cogent strategy to oppose the allure of the suppression of the pursuit of knowledge is not to deny the potential dangers of future technology nor the theoretical feasibility of disastrous scenarios, but rather to build the case that the continued relatively open pursuit of knowledge is the most reliable (albeit not foolproof) way to reap the promise while avoiding the peril of profound twenty-first century technologies...
...4.8 percent...
...Tucker then combines his spurious explanation for nonexistent demand growth with his equally false belief that California added no generating capacity after 1994, leaving the state "woefully short of power...
...Gilder has written with great enthusiasm and insight in his books and newsletters of the exponential growth of many technologies, including Gilder's Law on the explosion of bandwidth...
...He is building central generating stations as fast as possible (much to Lovins's dismay...
...They build to meet aggregate demand...
...In short, Tucker's thesis is as false as his data...
...it's crawling.The Internet's tiny use of electricity isn't just my claim...
...the same figure for the hot summer of MaySeptember 2000, 8.3 percent...
...html) now accepted by virtually every professional organization in electricity and information technology...
...Most important, Lovins claims my figures add up to a "spurious explanation for nonexistent demand growth...
...In my own writings, I have shown how the exponential growth of the power of technology is pervasive and affects a great multiplicity of areas...
...If that isn't "demand growth," what is...
...it's an irrefutable, carefully measured fact (http://enduse.lbl.gov/Projects/InfoTech...
...There are many positive reasons that nanobots will be developed, including dramatic implications for health, the environment, and the economy...
...Of course, it is the nature of future technology that it doesn't exist today...
...I mainly regret the omission because his comments would have made the article much better...
...I also helped make regulation emulate efficient market outcomes by rewarding utilities for cutting customers bills, not for selling more electricity...
...Tucker also believes California's power supplies were overwhelmed by soaring peak demand: "By the spring [of 2000], month-to-month peak usages were up 21 percent over 1999...
...But in the mid1990s, they were abandoned, over my vigorous protests, and dreadful policy blunders created today's disaster...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
