The FuturArc Interview

To Make Toast, Not Be Toast: Amory Lovins on Renewables, China, and Urbanisation.

Drawing on his background in physics, Amory Lovins advised US President Jimmy Carter's administration on energy policy at age 30 and has since consulted for a long succession of governments and firms, gaining a reputation as one of the world's leading experts on energy efficiency. Currently the chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute, a non-profit research and educational foundation aiming to foster efficient and sustainable use of resources, Lovins was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2009. FuturArc US Correspondent Jalel Sager caught up with him in the US in April.

The following is an excerpt from the interview.

JS: So, I've been reading some of your early work and am fairly amazed by how valid it is to the situation we find ourselves in today regarding energy, especially the soft path/hard path dichotomy. I would just like to ask you what we've gotten right over the past 35 years since you wrote "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" ⁱ and what we've gotten wrong.
AL: We've doubled our energy productivity. We've had fairly steady improvements in electric productivity since the 1990s, accelerating substantially in this decade. So now electricity is also decoupled from economic growth, which we did not see before. We're using now about half less total energy, two-thirds less directly used natural gas, less than half the oil and about a fifth less electricity to produce a dollar per GDP than we did in 1975. Also, by the way, about two-thirds less water.

More importantly, we're now starting to have a more mature way to market and deliver efficiency and we've had dramatic and largely unperceived progress in the power and cheapness of efficiency technologies. The size of the remaining efficiency resource has actually increased and its cost has fallen because the technologies have improved faster than we applied them.

There's also an even more important form of innovation that our institute has developed in the past decade or so, and that's innovation not in the technologies for saving energy but in how you combine them to make very large energy savings cost less than small or no savings—that is, to get expanding, not diminishing, returns to investments in energy efficiency. That's a game changer boost effect we'll roll out in the years ahead as our Factor 10 Engineering project (www.10xE.org) gains traction and changes how engineering is taught and done.

On the supply side, on the other hand, we've had notable failures. My soft energy path graph explicitly assumed a friendly—but we got a hostile—policy environment for most of the past quarter-century. And therefore, we're only just starting in the past few years to have many of the conditions and the pace of growth in domestic renewable supply that we should have had in the 1970s.

JS: I wonder if you think this decoupling between energy use, or perhaps emissions from energy use, and economic growth is happening fast enough for us to avoid the disruptions that some scientists see occurring in the near- to medium-term?
AL: Not yet, but accelerating nicely. The US has typically reduced its energy intensity about 2 to 4 percent a year for many, many years in times of both low and high prices. On the other hand, China cut its energy intensity over 5 percent a year for a quarter-century, fell off the rails in 2001, but last year got back on the rails with about a 5 percent drop in energy intensity. And many foreign companies have cut their energy intensity 6 to 16 percent a year and made billions of dollars' profit substituting efficiency for fuel. Now, if local energy intensity continues to drift down at just about 1 percent a year or 1.5 percent, then emissions of carbon would, by normal projections, triple by 2100 and then we're all toast.

Of course, the objective is to make toast, not be toast. If we could raise that rate of cutting energy intensity from 1 to 2 percent a year, it would roughly stabilise emissions, and if we could achieve 3 or 4 percent a year, we could avoid adding to whatever climate chaos is already baked in. By the way, in the United States, when we paid attention to oil from 1977 to '85, we cut our oil intensity by an average of 5.2 percent a year.

ⁱ A. B. Lovins, "Energy strategy: the road not taken?," Foreign Affairs 55, no. 1 (1976): 65-96.

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