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This week, temperatures dropped below freezing in Snowmass Colorado. Amory Lovelins, who lives at 7,200ft above the sea level, didn’t even turn on the heating.
That’s because he has no heating to turn on. His home, a great place to live. Adobe and glass mountainside views eyrieThe 1980s-designed house, which he built, captures solar energy and is so well insulated, he can grow and harvest bananas and other tropical fruits there, without burning oil, gas, or wood.
Nicknamed the “Einstein of energy efficiency”, Lovins, an adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, has been one of the world’s leading advocates and innovators of energy conservation for 50 years. He wrote his first paper on climate change while at Oxford in 1968, and in 1976 he offered Jimmy Carter’s government a blueprint for how to triple energy efficiency and get off oil and coal Within 40 years. His Rocky Mountain Institute has been advising governments and major industries for many years.
However, efficiency was seen as a little sister to the transition to renewables. It may now be the right time, he believes. Lovins supports mass insulation of buildings, as well as a massive acceleration of renewables. “We should crank [them]Up with wartime urgency. There should be far more emphasis on efficiency,” he says.
He sees Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine as an outrage, but possibly also a step towards solving the climate crisis and a way to save trillions of dollars. “He has managed to bring about all the outcomes that he most feared, but he may inadvertently have put the energy transition and climate solutions into a higher gear. The disruption will determine whether or not we end in recession. [Putin’s war] may prove to be a great thing for climate economics.” As it happens, Lovins has family connections to Ukraine: all four of his grandparents were early 20th-century immigrants from small villages between Kyiv and Odesa. One relative is still there. The rest, as far he knows, were killed in the 1941 massacre at Tarashcha. This occurred when there was a Jewish population of almost 14,000 people. Nazis slaughteredOnly 11 people were left, all of whom were off in the woods harvesting mushrooms that day.
“Solar and wind are now the cheapest bulk power sources in 91% of the world, and the UN’s International Energy AgencyThe International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that renewables will generate 90% of all new electricity in the next few years. The energy revolution has already begun. Sorry if you missed it,” he says.
However, he claims that the problem today, like the 1970s oil shocks in 1970s, is not where to get energy but how to make it more efficient. The answer is what he calls “integrative, or whole-system, design,” a way to employ orthodox engineering to achieve radically more energy-efficient results by changing the design logic.
He points out his house. It can be designed to collect energy and use no heating. It saves 99% of space- and heat-heating energy and 90% of electricity. “And it’s cheaper to build and saves construction costs,” he adds.
“It turns out that if you make [a]Cars made from carbon fibre can be up to twice as efficient as cars made of water. They also require half the amount of energy and time required to put together. And it needs a lot fewer batteries because it’s holding less weight because the carbon fibre is light. The carbon fibre is more expensive than the batteries and propulsion system.
“So if you do this across the whole economy, really designing whole systems in factories, equipment, buildings, vehicles, you’ll end up with severalfold larger energy savings than practically anyone now thinks is available. And the cost goes down.”
This integrative design approach has been mostly adopted in the private sector. Walmart, the world’s largest truck operator, improved its energy efficiency by nearly 40% by rethinking its operation. Other retail and automotive companies such as Tesla, BMW and others have also seen significant energy savings. Lovins’ most spectacular early success may have been his 1991 Hypercar concept, an all-electric, carbon-fibre-bodyvehicle that could go 300 miles per gallon. Although it was dismissed at the time, all carmakers now believe that this is possible.
The reward for governments that are truly energy efficient is enormous. Lovins and RMI have calculated that at least two-thirds – and probably as much as three-quarters – of all fossil fuel-generated energy could be profitably saved in most industrialised countries, and even more in developing countries because they tend to be less efficient to begin with and can more easily build things right than fix them later.
He states that Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Japan are the leaders in building technology, while Japan is leading in industry. Lovins refers the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.Aceee(which is intelligent efficiency, Smart buildings Smart manufacturingAll are advancing. “For speed of improvement, though not absolute level since they started so low, China is the undisputed champion,” says Lovins.
Lovins worries that design has been reduced to a few pieces and that we are losing the larger energy picture that the Victorians had. In a recent podcastWith the UK energy advisor Micheal Liebreich, they explain how savings can be made in areas that are least expected. Because there is less friction, it takes less energy to heat or cold fat straight pipes rather than long, crooked ones.
“In our house we save 97% of the pumping energy by properly laying out some pipes. Well, if everyone in the world did that to their pipes and ducts, you would save about a fifth of the world’s electricity, or half the coal-fired electricity. And you get your money back instantly in new-build or in under a year typically in retrofits in buildings and industry.”
And yet, he says, this sort of energy efficiency is not taught, and it’s certainly not in any government study or climate model. Why not? “Because it’s not a technology. It’s a bloody design,” he says.
He believes that nuclear power is the most inefficient and expensive design. It is heavily subsidised and pushed by a powerful lobby. Using it to address shortages of electricity or to counter climate change, he argues, is like offering starving people rice and caviar when it’s far cheaper and easier to give just rice.
“When you have a climate and energy emergency, like now, you need to invest judiciously, not indiscriminately, to buy the most efficient solution. It is better to invest in fast, cheap, and certain technologies like solar or wind than in one that is slow, speculative, and very expensive. Anything else makes climate change worse than it needs to be.”
He demolishes the technology with statistics. “In 2020 the world added 0.4 gigawatts more nuclear capacity than it retired, whilst the world added 278 gigawatts of renewables – that’s a 782-fold greater capacity. The world’s renewables increased the supply and displaced as much carbon every 38 hours as nuclear did throughout the year. Renewables are more affordable than nuclear and have a lower efficiency. There is no new type, size, or fuel cycle for a reactor that can change this. Do the math. It is game over.”
The future must be in the mass retrofitting of buildings with insulation and heat pumps and what he calls “outsolation”. “You can design out the pipes by putting a sort of tea cosy around houses, like the Dutch EnergiesprongExterior retrofit. They can superinsulate your house to net zero standard in a single day whilst you’re at work, and meanwhile they’ve dropped in a very efficient heat pump core for mechanicals, and put on a super-insulated solar roof. And when you get back, you pay them rather than your energy companies.”
It is better and more cost-effective to invest in efficiency in an emergency situation like this. It takes creative thinking. Why should engineers and architects get paid for what is spent, but not what is saved? Why reward energy companies for selling more electricity, and not for cutting costs? Why not make the tax system work for renewables?
Lovins is now the chair for RMI. His colleagues work in the cement and forestry industries as well as the farming and retail sectors. He is optimistic that shorthaul and long-haul aircrafts will soon become electrified and more energy-efficient through the use of ultralight frames and structures, fuel, and surfaces.
He jokes only half-jokingly when he calls for a mass movement to knit millions upon millions of cheerful yellow and blue woolly caps. That, and people lowering their thermostats by two to three degrees, would save billions in cubic metres of gas.
“Putin’s war is being financed by those who buy Russian fossil fuels. In the first two weeks the west has paid €8bn to Russia. We have a new energy crisis, and efficiency is the largest, cheapest, safest, cleanest and fastest way to address it,” he says.
Lovins is at 7,200 feet in Snowmass and is enjoying crop No 79 of his bananas. Crop No 80 is also being harvested. “Lots of other tropical fruits too,” he adds.
