Amory Lovins
Kupfer, David
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Amory Lovins BY DAVID KUPFER His name connotes a genre, a school of thought, an entire outlook on energy efficiency, conservation, and the use of renewable resources....
...It's effectively a dehydrated instant development kit—just add activist and stir...
...Osage, Iowa, population 3,800, had a municipal utility which for about a dozen years helped people to save energy in simple ways...
...This may mean that we don't make much, if any, money off of creating a trillion-dollar industry, but if so, that may be the price of getting lots of good hypercars to market quickly...
...they're just not articulated...
...Q: What other innovations excite you...
...It's the most exciting time to be alive that I can find anywhere in history...
...Q: So holding out for a sustainable future isn't unreasonable...
...For more information about RMI, write: 1739 Snowmass Creek Road, Snowmass, CO 81654-9199...
...Lovins's wit and humor give him a remarkable ability to grasp problems, see creative solutions, and bring about institutional change...
...Trained as a physicist, Lovins has published twenty-two books and hundreds of technical and popular papers, and consulted for scores of utilities, governments, and industries worldwide...
...It can be sportier, safer, and more beautiful, quiet, durable, and comfortable than normal cars—and probably cheaper...
...In well-designed, very efficient offices, labor productivity typically goes up by about 6 percent to 16 percent, because people can see what they are doing, hear themselves think, and feel more comfortable...
...Q: But you are hopeful about the future...
...Lovins: Because our mission at Rocky Mountain Institute is to save resources, not to get rich...
...Lovins: An inexpensive, easy-to-make, easy-to-fix photovoltaic ultraviolet disinfectant for water...
...A light hybrid two-seater the size of a Corvette, built by students at Western Washington University, was tested in Los Angeles traffic last year by the U.S...
...There will certainly be some difficult times and some awful events ahead of us, but we are seeing more and more signs of a sudden cessation of stupidity...
...Q: So you believe we have all the technologies at hand to solve our technical problems...
...In 1982, my wife and colleague, Hunter, and I wanted to gather together a handful of colleagues so that we could work more effectively than by ourselves...
...Lovins: The nuclear industry is dead in all market economies—that is, places where market decisions govern the energy sector...
...With better working conditions, they can do more and better work...
...It's costing our country close to $50 billion a year in trade deficit, and the same again in peacetime-military-readiness costs...
...Q: Why didn't you just patent your idea and sell it to the highest bidder...
...Since this work got the Nissan Prize in autumn 1993 at ISATA, the big European car-technology conference, the big boys have been paying very careful attention...
...Lovins: The American utility industry is now in the greatest turmoil in its century of history because of this idea called "retail wheeling"—a concept so bizarre that it would have been largely ignored if the previously sensible California Public Utilities Commission hadn't given it credence by proposing last April to adopt it whole hog...
...Over the past couple of decades, states allowed utilities to build some very expensive plants (mainly nuclear plants) or to buy some very expensive private power...
...Just fuels sustainably derived from farm and forestry wastes could run the whole U.S...
...He always does...
...This shook some of us, but Amory had the figures to back himself up...
...That is just what we wanted to achieve...
...If we had just kept on saving oil as quickly after 1985 as we did for the previous nine years, we would not have needed a drop of oil from the Persian Gulf since then...
...Lovins: Although oil looks cheap today—we sell gasoline for less than bottled water—it isn't really cheap...
...They seem obvious, not surprising...
...RMI's Economic Renewal Project has developed a series of workbooks and casebooks that citizen task forces can use on their own...
...What is it...
...Lovins: We've already cut the energy bill in the United States by about $160 billion a year...
...After thirteen years, the Institute has ripened into an important source of innovation, working on the connections among energy, transportation, water, agriculture, local economic development, green real-estate projects, and global security...
...Q: Is the nuclear industry history...
...So we've made dramatic progress...
...Q: With your local economic-development program, have you discovered many good working examples of sustainable bottom-up strategies...
...Many problems need completely different kinds of solutions: for example, how do we meet nonmaterial needs by nonmaterial means...
...It has profound ramifications for America's competitiveness, foreign policy, oil imports, military missions____ Q: What would it do to oil imports...
...People would buy it because it's a better car, not because it saves fuel and prevents pollution: they'd buy it for the reason they now buy CDs instead of vinyl records...
...Seemingly indefatigable, Lovins continues to lecture widely...
...We found that by combining advanced technology, creative use of market forces, aikido politics, and Jeffersonian community organizing, we can solve many problems at once without making new ones, and can usually protect the environment not at a cost but at a profit...
...Our mission at Rocky Mountain Institute is to save resources, not to get rich.* Q: You've now been working on the "supercar" concept for several years...
...And this is starting to happen not only on paper but on real wheels...
...transportation sector...
...I would like to leave the world a much better place than I found it, and help other people to do their best.* David Kupfer is a freelance writer in northwest California, where he grows organic food...
...instead, we get energy from fuel, because fuel contains 100 times as much energy per pound as the best batteries do...
...A self-avowed "techno twit," in 1993 he was granted a genius award from the MacArthur Foundation...
...Within weeks of our training people in Kentucky, some of them had the process up and running in their own communities with no further help from us...
...We now have a staff of forty in Old Snowmass, plus another thirty in a Boulder subsidiary called E source, the leading source of technical information about advanced electric efficiency...
...The conservationist David Brower encouraged Lovins not to finish his studies at Oxford nearly twenty-five years ago...
...Lovins: My hierarchy of needs is to save the world, have fun, and make money, in that order...
...One is to make the car ultralight—three or four times lighter than now by using very strong, bouncy composite materials—and aerodynamically very slippery...
...Some big industrial customers, collectively using perhaps 4 percent of the nation's electricity, want to avoid paying for that costly power...
...Lovins: We just changed the name from "supercar" to "hyper-car" to avoid confusion: the press was calling any more efficient car a "supercar," no matter how mediocre it was or how it was designed, and racing people use "supercar" to refer to street-licensed race cars that get about 200 miles per hour, not per gallon...
...Making hypercars is a completely different kind of business...
...Q: What are your individual goals...
...Lovins: No—with apologies to Fritz Schumacher, who was once called a crank, and replied, "You know, I rather like that: cranks are simple and nonviolent, and they cause revolutions...
...But three years ago, I was astonished to find that if you make a car ultralight and hybrid, its efficiency goes up by roughly five- to twenty-fold...
...It got the equivalent of 202 miles per gallon, and the next version, now in testing, should do even better...
...Department of Energy...
...This has already happened to most of the coal and uranium in the ground: they're now mainly good for holding up the ground...
...Two of my colleagues have an exciting research finding that may change the way energy efficiency is sold...
...Q: How is the health of Rocky Mountain Institute...
...Lovins: Yes, but we have trouble seeing what is not a technical problem...
...We've hardly scratched the surface of how much efficiency or renewable supply is available or worth buying...
...I'm not really telling people anything they don't already know, except perhaps in technical details, but rather new ways of putting ideas together...
...This isn't surprising, although it flies in the face of management theory which claims that the building doesn't matter— all that matters is how you manage people...
...The more competition we have in the electric sector, the more those costly-to-repair nuclear plants will be exposed as uncompetitive...
...In RMFs headquarters, we're growing our eighteenth passive-solar banana crop with no furnace despite outdoor temperatures as low as minus-forty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, and it was cheaper than usual to construct...
...So rather than trying to patent and auction off the hypercar work and then hope the buyer doesn't sit on it, we deliberately put most of it into the public domain and got everyone fighting over it...
...That, plus better tires, normally improves the car's efficiency by a factor of two to two-and-a-half...
...We now have versions that can let in light without unwanted heat, so that in very hot or cold climates, we can eliminate heating or cooling equipment, and therefore save enormous amounts of energy, pollution, and capital costs...
...Lovins: A hypercar, technically called an ultralight hybrid, is an artful fusion of two innovations...
...Lovins: Yes—hundreds of them...
...Most importantly, the energy savings then kept in town more than $1,000 per household per year—money that had previously gone out of town and out of state to buy utility inputs, but is now sticking around Main Street, supporting local jobs and multipliers, and making Osage noticeably more prosperous than comparable towns nearby...
...The Middle East would therefore become irrelevant and the price would crash...
...He said America had too much energy, that the hydro-nuclear-coal-electric grid was silly, often unnecessary, heavily subsidized by taxpayers, dangerous, and uneconomical, that the peaceful atom was a myth masking a bloated war machine...
...I'm particularly concerned about the depletion of renewable resources...
...what's missing is only the system integration to put them together...
...We recently put a bunch of our young people in 0.56-mile-per-gallon tanks and seventeen-feet-per-gallon aircraft carriers because we hadn't put them in thirty-two-mile-per-gallon cars...
...I suppose this idea—that elegant frugality pays—is the most prominent theme of what I've been doing for the past twenty years...
...The water that comes out is free of disease-causing bacteria and viruses...
...With so little demand, most of the oil in the ground would be no longer worth extracting...
...Q: What are the chances we'll soon see commercial availability of something like a "hypercar...
...Hybrid drive improves the efficiency of a normal car by maybe 30 percent to 50 percent...
...Q: But why save oil when we're awash in the stuff...
...He traverses the globe in his mission to bring resource-efficiency reason into the energy-policy world...
...The mining company went away mad but better off, since the copper market crashed soon thereafter...
...Lovins took photos, conducted research, and wrote text for a large coffee-table book about the plans of the world's biggest mining company, RTZ, to strip-mine copper in Snowdonia National Park, or as it's locally called, Eryri, in North Wales...
...And by wasting that money and weakening the economy, that wasted oil cost a lot of American jobs...
...The other main change is to make the car hybrid-electric...
...Q: So RMI is actively working to promote the notion that regional sustainable bottom-up economic development is possible and practical...
...We suspected that getting the competitive juices flowing would get more and better hypercars on the road faster than any exclusively proprietary arrangement...
...Lovins: RMI is rich in accomplishments and potential, even though financially we're still nomadic hunter-gatherers...
...Today, with 20/20 hindsight, it is clear that these investments were a bad buy...
...That would reverse a principle central to the whole history of utility regulation—sharing all electricity fairly...
...In rare rational moments I actually do think we may get out of this difficult cultural adolescence in one piece...
...Let's take just one...
...He had better things to do, says Brower, who enlisted Lovins in a stunningly successful wilderness-conservation effort...
...What I'm doing is deeply conservative...
...Amory set a standard by inventing the soft energy path, which challenged everything," says Brower...
...The car doesn't get its energy from a half-ton of batteries that must be plugged in to recharge...
...I spoke with him during a 1994 visit to San Francisco...
...Lovins: No—and not only in the sense that cultural suicide is unprofitable, but also because almost everything one would want to do for sustainability is also more profitable, even in the narrowest economic terms, than what we are doing now...
...Q: Do you consider yourself a radical...
...Lovins: A little, for understandable cultural reasons—hyper-cars would turn the auto industry completely upside down, and that naturally makes some of its inhabitants uncomfortable— but not as much as I'd expected...
...Amory Lovins, forty-seven, directs research at Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit resource policy center in Colorado, which he and his wife, Hunter, founded thirteen years ago...
...But we're still wasting over $300-billion-a-year worth of energy...
...It's very agile, with cheap tooling, local production, probably direct sale to the customer, and on-site maintenance—just like a mail-order personal computer...
...This means that the wheels are driven by special electric motors, but the electricity to drive those motors is made on board as needed by burning any convenient fuel in a tiny engine or other power plant...
...Failure to do that cost our nation some $23 billion last year alone in unnecessary oil imports...
...As a result, some utilities, including all three of the big private ones in California, now have rates much higher than those of some neighboring utilities...
...Hypercars are competitively advantageous to automakers, because they can reduce product-cycle time, assembly space and labor, and tooling costs by close to ten-fold, and the number of parts by even more...
...Altogether, bringing automaking out of the Iron Age will be the biggest change in industrial structure since the microchip...
...A 1 percent gain in labor productivity does the same for a business's bottom line as eliminating its electric bills...
...I don't say that in the modern misuse of the term to mean "reactionary...
...Lovins: Yes, much more so than I was a few years ago...
...Most truths are already known...
...Q: Are you getting the same kind of resistance to this radical idea that you did when you used to say how much electricity could be cost-effectively saved...
...But far from exhausting the cheapest opportunities, we've built up an ever-bigger backlog of untapped ways to get better services with less energy and less money...
...In fact, their excessive costs are the biggest single factor behind major industries' recent moves to restructure the utility industry: some big industries want to evade those costs by shifting them to smaller and weaker customers...
...That in turn attracted two big factories to town and kept the existing ones competitive in global markets: the sock-knitting mill even tripled its number of employees...
...Superwindows continue to evolve...
...So far, that judgment has been well vindicated...
...Q: OK, so it's a "hypercar...
...The resulting car can carry your family coast-to-coast on one tank of any fuel, liquid or gaseous, fossil or renewable...
...How is it going...
...Q: What is going to happen to public utilities in today's political climate...
...The handful got a bit out of hand...
...As a result, the utility was able to prepay all its debt, build up a healthy surplus for emergencies, and cut the rates five times in five years (in fact, they went down by one-third excluding inflation, to only half the state average...
...So this is a benefit about ten times as important as eliminating the electric bills, and yet we hadn't been counting it before...
...Lovins: Oil imports would become unnecessary, because worldwide, hypercars and their heavy-vehicle analogues would save more oil than OPEC now extracts...
...Lovins: Yes...
...In America, at least a third of all the operating reactors, and arguably a lot more, will be shut down by the end of this decade because we can't afford to keep running and fixing them...
...Q: What is the status of our progress down the "soft energy path"—the use of efficiency and renewable energy...
...Once it's deployed in a few years, this gadget will save millions of babies now dying of dysentery and similar water-borne diseases...
...I'm not nearly so concerned about the depletion of nonrenewable resources such as oil or copper as about the depletion of things that ought to be renewable but are being mined, such as topsoil, biodiversity, social tolerance, traditional culture, civic virtue, and morality...
...It's still barely clinging to life, thanks to heroic life-support measures, in a few centrally planned energy systems—notably in Russia, China, Japan, France, Taiwan, and South Korea—based on clearly noneconomic motives...
...His last interview for The Progressive was with David Brower in the May 1994 issue...
...Instead, they want to buy the cheapest power on the system and make everyone else pay for the expensive power...
...Its mission is to foster the efficient and sustainable use of resources as a path to global security...
...It's also about 100 to 1,000 times cleaner...
...Water circulates through a trough in thin layers and gets exposed to hard ultraviolet light made by a solar-powered lamp...
...Some auto-company engineers are even more radical than I am about what can be done...
...That's all we would have needed to do to displace the need for any oil from the Persian Gulf...
...Lovins: Excellent, because everything required is already commercially available...
...The car would be superior in all respects...
...Attractive new markets would also open up for biofuels...
Vol. 59 • May 1995 • No. 5
