NOTHIN’ SAYS LOVINS LIKE AN INTERVIEW WITH LOVINS

David Roberts at Grist did the heavy lifting on this interview and NewEnergyNews can’t lift his work but this is Amory Lovins! Spread the word! Follow the link back to David’s original interview, which has links to Lovins’ myriad other references.

All You Need Is Lovins; A conversation with energy guru Amory Lovins
David Roberts, 26 Jul 2007 (Grist)

WHO
Amory Lovins: “His speech is studded with pregnant pauses -- you can almost hear the whirs and clicks as an enormous mass of statistics, analyses, and aphorisms is trimmed and edited into a manageable length…No one has done more to change the world of energy, both its intellectual underpinnings and its real-world practice, than Lovins…”

Amory Lovins

WHAT
Lovins’ opinions on energy, because his ideas on energy have always been important, from his 1976 article "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" to his recent book “Winning the Oil Endgame.”

WHEN
- This year:
The interview marks the 25th anniversary of Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute. He calls it a “think-and-do tank.” The celebration will be in early August and will be attended by a guest list beginning with X-Pres Bill Clinton and the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman.
- Now:
“…A fifth of the world's electricity and a quarter of the world's new electricity comes from micropower -- that is, combined heat and power (also called cogeneration) and distributed renewables. Micropower provides anywhere from a sixth to over half of all electricity in most of the industrial countries. This is not a minor activity anymore; it's well over $100 billion a year in assets. And it's essentially all private risk capital.
So in 2005, micropower added 11 times as much capacity and four times as much output as nuclear worldwide, and not a single new nuclear project on the planet is funded by private risk capital. What does this tell you? I think it tells you that nuclear, and indeed other central power stations, have associated costs and financial risks that make them unattractive to private investors…”

WHERE
- Lovins on the marketplace of new ideas and new energy:
“…I think a good way to smoke out corporate socialists in free-marketeers' clothing is to ask whether they agree that all ways to save or produce energy should be allowed to compete fairly at honest prices, regardless of which kind they are, what technology they use, where they are, how big they are, or who owns them. I can tell you who won't be in favor of it: the incumbent monopolists, monopsonists, and oligarchs who don't like competition and new market entrants. But whether they like it or not, competition happens. It's particularly keen on the demand side…”



- Lovins on Iraq electricity:
“If you build an efficient, diverse, dispersed, renewable electricity system, major failures -- whether by accident or malice -- become impossible by design rather than inevitable by design, an attractive nuisance for terrorists and insurgents. There's a pretty good correlation between neighborhoods with better electrical supply and those that are inhospitable to insurgents. This is well known in military circles. There's still probably just time to do this in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, about a third of our army's wartime fuel use is for generator sets, and nearly all of that electricity is used to air-condition tents in the desert, known as "space cooling by cooling outer space." We recently had a two-star Marine general commanding in western Iraq begging for efficiency and renewables to untether him from fuel convoys, so he could carry out his more important missions. This is a very teachable moment for the military. The costs, risks, and distractions of fuel convoys and power supplies in theater have focused a great deal of senior military attention on the need for not dragging around this fat fuel-logistics tail -- therefore for making military equipment and operations several-fold more energy efficient…

WHY
- Lovins on political action:
“…People will vote with their wallets as well as their ballots, in a way that will affect the political system and even more the private sector, which is quite good at selling what you want and not selling what you don't buy. The interplay between business and civil society is even more important than between business and government, and that is where I want to continue to focus most of my effort. I admire those who try to reform public policy, but I don't spend much time doing that myself. In a tripolar world of business, civil society, and government, why would you want to focus on the least effective of that triad?”
- Lovins on biofuels:
“You're treating biofuels as generic and I don't think that's appropriate. There are much smarter and much dumber approaches to biofuels, and biofuels do not need to have the problems you refer to…We suggest that U.S. mobility fuels could be provided without displacing any food crops. You could do it just with switchgrass and the like on conservation reserve land. Being a perennial, which can even be grown in polyculture, switchgrass and its relatives would hold the soil better because they're much deeper rooted than the shallow-rooted annuals with which that erosion-prone land is often planted. And of course the perennials don't need any cultivation or other inputs.
Just a few weeks ago my colleagues and I led the redesign of a cellulosic ethanol plant -- we were able to cut out very large fractions of its energy and capital need by designing it differently. There are other process innovations we're aware of that would achieve similar results. I would not write off biofuels at all…”



QUOTES
- Lovins on auto fuel efficiency:
“We can triple the efficiency of our cars and light trucks without compromised performance and with better safety, and we could also, if we want to get really conservative, stop subsidizing and mandating sprawl so we'd have less of it.
The automotive revolution alone has a number of steps you could do in whatever order you'd like. In round numbers, if you take a really good hybrid and drive it properly…you roughly double its efficiency. If you make it ultra-light and ultra-low-drag, you roughly redouble its efficiency. Now you're using a quarter the oil per mile you were before. If you then run it on, say, properly grown cellulosic E85, you quadruple its oil efficiency per mile again -- you're using a 16th the oil per mile that you started with. If you make it a good plug-in hybrid and have a good economic model to pay for the batteries -- some of those are starting to emerge -- then you at least double efficiency again. Now you're down to about 3 percent the oil per mile you started with. And of course there are also renewable-electricity battery-electric cars. There are some sensible and profitable ways to do hydrogen, to displace the last bit of oil or biofuel, and there are other options like algal oils that are becoming very interesting. It's a rather rich menu, and you don't need all of it to get largely or completely off oil and make money on the deal…”