Amory B. Lovins
Answering the Energy Challenge
Nearly 90 percent of the world's economy is fueled every year by digging up and burning about four cubic miles of the rotted remains of primeval swamp goo. With extraordinary skill, the world's most powerful industries have turned that oil, gas, and coal into affordable and convenient fuels and electricity that have created wealth, helped build modern civilization, and enriched the lives of billions.
Yet today, the rising costs and risks of these fossil fuels are undercutting the security and prosperity they have enabled. Each day,
In all,
Weaning
But epochal energy shifts have happened before. In 1850, most U.S. homes used whale-oil lamps, and whaling was the country's fifth-biggest industry. But as whale populations dwindled, the price of whale oil rose, so between 1850 and 1859, coal-derived synthetic fuels grabbed more than five-sixths of the lighting market. In 1859,
As the world shuddered from the 1973 oil shock, the economist
Underlying this shift in supply is the inexorable shrinkage in the energy needed to create
This transformation requires pursuing three agendas. First, radical automotive efficiency can make electric propulsion affordable; heavy vehicles, too, can save most of their fuel; and all vehicles can be used more productively. Second, new designs can make buildings and factories several times as efficient as they are now. Third, modernizing the electric system to make it diverse, distributed, and renewable can also make it clean, reliable, and secure. These ambitious shifts may seem quixotic, but sometimes tough problems are best solved by enlarging their boundaries, as General
Thus, it is easier to solve the problems of all four energy-using sectors -- transportation, buildings, industry, and electricity -- together than separately. For example, electric vehicles could recharge from or supply power to the electricity grid at times that compensate for variations in the output from wind and solar power. Synergies likewise arise from integrating innovations in technology, policy, design, and strategy, not just the first one or two.
This transition will require no technological miracles or social engineering -- only the systematic application of many available, straightforward techniques. It could be led by business for profit and sped up by revenue-neutral policies enacted by U.S. states or federal agencies, and it would need from
MOBILITY WITHOUT OIL
Ultralight, aerodynamic autos make electric propulsion affordable because they need fewer costly batteries or fuel cells. Rather than wringing pennies from old steel-stamping and engine technologies, automakers could exploit mutually reinforcing advances in carbon fiber, its structural manufacturing, and electric propulsion -- a transition as game changing as the shift from typewriters to computers.
Electric autos are already far cheaper to fuel than gasoline autos, and they could also cost about the same to buy within a few decades. Until then, "feebates" -- rebates for more efficient new autos, paid for by equivalent fees on inefficient ones -- could prevent sticker shock. In just two years,
Autos could also be used more productively. If the government employed new methods to charge drivers for road infrastructure by the mile, its insolvent
RMI's analysis found that by 2050,
Heavy vehicles present similar opportunities. From 2005 to 2010,
U.S. gasoline demand peaked in 2007; the oil use of the countries of the
SAVING ELECTRICITY
The next big shift is to raise electricity productivity faster than the economy grows -- starting with
An even more powerful innovation, called "integrative design," can often save far more energy still, yet at lower cost. Integrative design optimizes a whole building, factory, vehicle, or device for multiple benefits, not isolated components for single benefits. For example, in 2010, the
Integrative design's expanding returns are even more impressive when built in from scratch. From tropical to subarctic climates, new passively heated and cooled buildings can replace furnaces and air conditioners with superinsulation, heat recovery, and design that exploits the local climate. European companies have built 32,000 such structures at roughly normal capital cost and cost-effectively retrofitted similar performance into Swedish apartments constructed in the 1950s and into century-old Viennese apartments. The business case would be even stronger if it included the valuable indirect benefits of these more comfortable, pleasant, and healthful buildings: higher office labor productivity and retail sales, faster learning in classrooms, faster healing in hospitals, and higher real estate values everywhere.
Integrative design can also help double industrial energy productivity, saving
Adopting energy-saving innovations as quickly nationwide as some U.S. states do today will require patiently fixing perverse incentives, sharing benefits between landlords and tenants, allocating capital wisely, and designing thoughtfully -- not just copying the old drawings ("infectious repetitis"). None of this barrier busting is easy, but the rewards are great. Since the
REPOWERING PROSPERITY
Choosing electricity sources is complicated by copious disinformation, such as the myth that nuclear power was thriving in
Even after the U.S. government raised its subsidies for new reactors in 2005 to at least their construction costs, not one of the 34 proposed units could attract private capital; they simply had no business case. Neither do proposed "small modular reactors": nuclear reactors do not scale down well, and the economies sought from mass-producing hypothetical small reactors cannot overcome the head start enjoyed by small modular renewables, which have attracted
New coal and nuclear plants are so uneconomical that official U.S. energy forecasts predict no new nuclear and few new coal projects will be launched. Investors are shunning their high costs and financial risks in favor of small, fast, modular renewable generators. These reduce the financial risk of building massive, slow, monolithic projects, and needing no fuel, they hedge against volatile gas prices. Already, wind and solar power's falling costs are beating fossil-fueled power's and nuclear power's rising costs. Some solar panels now sell wholesale for less than
Skeptics of solar and wind power warn of their fluctuating output. But the grid can cope. Just as it routinely backs up nonworking coal-fired and nuclear plants with working ones, it can back up becalmed wind turbines or darkened solar cells with flexible generators (renewable or not) in other places or of other kinds, or with systems that voluntarily modulate demand. Even with little or no bulk power storage, diversified, forecastable, and integrated renewables can prove highly reliable. Such integration into a larger, more diverse grid is how in 2010
Diverse, dispersed, renewable sources can also make the grid highly resilient. Centralized grids are vulnerable to cascading blackouts caused by natural disaster, accident, or malice. But grid reorganizations in
Individual households can also declare independence from power outages and utility bills, as mine has. In many parts of
In 2010, renewable sources, except for big hydropower dams, produced only three percent of the world's electricity, but for the third year running, they were responsible for nearly half of all new capacity. That same year, they won
Legacy industries erect many anticompetitive roadblocks to U.S. renewable energy, often denying renewable power fair access to the grid or rejecting cheaper wind power to shield old plants from competition. In 34 U.S. states, utilities earn more profit by selling more electricity and less if customers' bills fall. In 37 states, companies that reduce electricity demand are not allowed to bid in auctions for proposed new power supplies. But wherever such impediments are removed, efficiency and renewables win. In 2009, developers offered 4.4 billion watts of solar power cheaper than electricity from an efficient new gas-fired plant, so
A COOLER AND SAFER WORLD
This new energy future offers a pragmatic solution to climate change. Often assumed to be costly, reducing carbon emissions is actually profitable, since saving fuel costs less than buying fuel. Profits, jobs, and competitive advantage make for easier conversations than costs, burdens, and sacrifices, and they need no global treaties to drive them.
In 2009, the consulting firm
Getting
Phasing out fossil fuels would turbocharge global development, which is also in
Investments in new electricity devour one-fourth of the world's development capital. There is no stronger nor more neglected lever for global development than investing instead in making devices that save electricity. This would require about one-thousandth the capital and return it ten times as fast, freeing up vast sums for other development needs. If
Developing countries, with their rural villages, burgeoning cities and slums, and dilapidated infrastructures, especially need renewable electricity, and they now buy the majority of the world's new renewable capacity. Some remote villages are not waiting for the wires but leapfrogging the grid: more Kenyans are getting electricity first from solar-power entrepreneurs than from traditional utilities. Such efforts as the
GETTING UNSTUCK
As
The chief obstacle is not technology or economics but slow adoption. Helping innovations catch on will take education, leadership, and rapid learning. But it does not require reaching a consensus on motives. If Americans agree what should be done, then they need not agree why. Whether one cares most about national security, health, the environment, or simply making money, saving and supplanting fossil fuels makes sense.
Wise energy policy can grow from impeccably conservative roots -- allowing and requiring all ways to save or produce energy to compete fairly at honest prices, regardless of their type, technology, size, location, or ownership. Who would oppose that? And what if
Moving
(AUTHOR BIO:
- A Farewell to Fossil Fuels
- United States Can't Control the World Oil Market
- The State of the World: Explaining U.S. Strategy
- Clear and Present Safety
- The Case for Space
- Drawdowns in Iraq And Afghanistan Recognition of Futility or Retreat from Coming Storm?
- Twitter Mentality a Threat to America
- Pro-Drug Legalization Forces Gaining Clout
- Is the US 'Pivot' to the Pacific genuine?
- America's Constitutional Paralysis
- Those Bad Old Days Are Still with Us
- Fracking Perils
- American Decline Could Worsen with Focus on Iran and China
- Trans-Atlantic Military Cooperation Gets Complicated
- Don't Expect Too Much of the Next American President
- The Dignity of Corpses
- Momentum of Cynicism
- The United States Has Seen Much Worse
- 2011 Not the Very Worst, But Definitely in the Bottom 10
- Government Has Not Failed the People as It Did in 1860
- 2011 Not the Worst, But a Year Americans Would Like to Forget
- 2011 Ups and Downs: Gallup Polls Show Year Full of Pessimism
- American Border Law Enforcement Uses More Military Equipment
- Globalization and the Threat to the West
- When Currencies Collapse
- Balancing the East, Upgrading the West
- Alabama's Immigration Aftershock
- High Stakes for Immigration
- Education Cuts Aren't Smart
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