The Lovinses and the Soft-Energy Path
Heating your house with electricity? Try a couple of 40-watt children instead
No one who is serious about solving the energy problem has gotten far without running into Amory and Hunter Lovins "They are the most exciting thinkers in energy policy today said James F. Hornig, chairman of Dartmouth's Environmental Studies Program. "More often than not they have proved to be five to six years ahead of everybody else." The Lovinses have just completed a spring term at the College as Henry R. Luce Visiting Professors of Environmental Studies, teaching an undergraduate seminar on energy policy and giving a series of campus-wide lectures on energy problems and nuclear weapons proliferation.
Amory Lovins, a consultant physicist, resigned as an Oxford don in 1971 to work with Friends of the Earth, to which he and Hunter are now joint policy advisers. In September 1976, ForeignAffairs published his article, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken," and it soon became the journal's most requested reprint. Following the article and its book-form version, Soft Energ)Paths: Toward a Durable Peace, Lovins' influence spread. He has since consulted with senior oil and utility company managers anc: briefed the prime ministers of Sweden and Canada, the chancellor of West Germany, and President Jimmy Carter.
Hunter Lovins, a lawyer, forester, sociologist, and political scientist, helped establish the California Conservation Project and has served on the Los Angeles Energy Management Board. Since 1979, the two have worked as a team, writing three books and numerous articles, lecturing, delivering seminars and advice. Their message is that an energy policy based on efficient energy use and appropriate renewable resources the "suit path" is a more economically prudent and sustainable choice than one dependent on large-scale, centralized sources using fossil and nuclear fuels. Efficiency measures include, for example, such "technical fixes" as insulation and weather stripping, and improved refrigerators, lightbulbs, and cars. "Soft energy sources include certain forms of solar heat for buildings and industry, small, existing hydropower plants, methanol, and windpower. The Lovinses pack their writings and lectures with concrete examples of these technologies and practices. Amory is famous for his ability to reel off graphs and statistics to any point. "He can outdebate anybody in the industry, S. Davis Freeman, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, told the Wall Street Journal.
After Dartmouth, the Lovinses will begin building their own 3,800-square-foot house/research center/indoor farm at 7,100 feet on the west slope of the Colorado Rockies, ihe house i"state-of-the-art soft-tech" with super-insulation, a 900-squartfoot interior greenhouse, air-to-air heat exchangers, and ocher advanced energy systems. A computer analysis predicted that t Lovins' heating bill would be $l3 a year. They expect to o better and to get their few dollars' worth of backup heat ™ "burning junk mail." Equally important, to them, the mulciourpose will be "affordable to build and beautiful to ' in." As for the heating bill, says Amory, "We're going to wo harder on that. That's just excessive."
Why have you chosen economics as a lever to getat the energy problem? Why not the social orenvironmental angle?
H.L.: Economics is the basis on which the power structure claims to be making its decisions. We find on analysis that it rarely is. Most policy decisions were made for some special interest or other, and then the subsidies were juggled to make the economics come out the way people wanted them to. The recent enthusiasm over synfuels was a classic example. If we really are 1 free market economy, then let's adhere to those principles and see where that gets us n energy policy. Where it gets us, of course, is not doing synfuels and not doing nuclear, but going for the cheapest things efficiency and renewables. A.L.: Economics is a handy way to focus on the gaps between rhetoric and action. Where given a chance, what semblance of a free market we have has done remarkably well at solving the energy problem very quickly.
President Kemeny once suggested that future energy resources in this country could be managedby technocrats who would make decisions hethought were toe complicated for the averageperson to make.
H.L.: The real decisions are, if anything, too simple and too political for technical experts to make. The scattered workings of the market are actually giving us a much preferable energy system an energy system that one would like to have for social, environmental, and political reasons. It's giving citizens the opportunity not only to participate in the decision but to end up with an energy system that they can understand and actually run. If you have technocrats running it, you end up with largescale devices, no political processes, no participation. The average citizen is left feeling helpless, hopeless, out of it a sort of "consumer humiliation."
A.L.: People are really pretty smart. Given incentive and opportunity, people who see the energy problem as their problem something they can do something about simply go out and solve the problem. In the past few years, we've gotten over 100 times as much new energy in this country from energy savings as from all expansions of supplies combined. Of those expansions, we've had more energy from renewables than from any or all of the nonrenewables even though the more conventional "hard-supply" technologies have received more than six times as much investment and more than ten times as much subsidy as efficiency or renewable sources.
It's faster as well as cheaper to do a lot of little simple things than a few big complicated things. This is the market in action, and it has all worked a lot better and faster than any of us thought possible. Unfortunately, the Reagan Administration has in no way adhered consistently to this view. They've tried free enterprise for the things they don't like and corporate socialism for the things they do like.
You put a lot of faith in the free market structure of this country.
A.L.: Imperfect though it is, it can't be all that stupid. Look, for example, at how it has killed nuclear power; how it is clearly starting to favor efficiency and renewables.
Where does this leave the large corporations? H.L.: The smart ones are already taking advantage of the very real investment opportunities in soft technologies.
A.L.: The chairman of Arco remarked to us recently that his oil company saw this coming early enough to get a good foothold in the markets for energy efficiency and renewable sources. He felt many other oil companies would probably not survive the eighties. The technologies we're talking about do not lend themselves at all well to monopoly. In fact, the chairman of Exxon, when asked why he had pulled out in defeat from the solar collector market in New England, said recently, "We can't get any comparative advantage in that business. We can't make solar panels any better than a couple of college kids can." In fact, he might have pointed out that Exxon could make them a lot worse, because unlike local small businesses, they can't match the climate and conditions of a particular place to give the best performance.
Is Soft Energy Paths prognosis or diagnosis? H.L.: A bit of both. It was originally a vision of what could happen, and an analysis of the economics showing that it would be a much better way to go. A separate, subsidiary argument was that it would do the least damage to our democratic values, to the environment and social structure. A.L.: One way or another, I think we're going to get to a soft-energy path, because that's all we can afford. The question is how hard will we make it on ourselves.
So you see the Reagan Administration as just atemporary setback along the way?
H.L.: That's what the statistics are showing. Despite the real interference in a free market that we're seeing from this Administration ironically enough efficiency and renewables continue to spread at a rate none of us predicted. A.L.: The hard technologies have essentially ground to a halt. Since about 1974, we've had 70-odd more cancellations than orders for nuclear power plants. In fact, in the past few years, more megawatts of new generating capacity have been ordered in small hydroelectric stations and wind generators than in coal or nuclear plants or both of them put together. When we're getting over 100 times as much new energy from people plugging holes in their buildings, plugging steam leaks, getting more efficient cars, and so forth than we're getting from all of the new oil wells, gas wells, coal mines, and power plants put together, then it's clear that something very dramatic is happening that few people in the energy business anticipated. H.L.: Companies that used to have a stake in the hard path are slowly switching to the soft path. General Electric, which never made a nickel selling reactors, is now pushing solar collectors and efficient light bulbs.
A.L.: Who is in photovoltaic cells now looks a bit like the Fortune 500. It is a very competitive business. I'm afraid, though, that we may lose that to the Japanese. I wish American industry were more alert to these opportunities. The story of Detroit is about to repeat itself. The best Toshiba refrigerators on the market use only a third as much electricity as the average American ones with the same specifications. (Their best experimental refrigerator is 20 times as efficient as the average American model.) Toshiba refrigerators should hit our market sometime this year. I'm afraid they will do to Frigidaire and the like roughly what Datsun, Toyota, and Honda did to General Motors.
Could hard and soft paths co-exist?
H.L.: People think of solar panels and reactors and say, "Gee, they can co-exist sobviously a hard path and a soft path are not mutually exclusive." What they'redo xng, though, is mistaking technology for path. A path is a definition of the way we're doing things. It's the collection of the technologies and the way we spend our money; it's also a set of habits and organizations forming a social context. You can certainly stick solar panels on a reactor; it may even help it work better. But you can't, as a society, choose to move in one direction and virtually the opposite at the same time. You'll end up achieving neither and wasting a lot of money. A.L.: The resources devoted to one line of development are not available for another. We see this in federal budget debates all the time, but it's also true in private investment.
In commitments of resources, in institutional barriers, and in perceptions we feel these paths are very clearly exclusive. But we're now in a sort of hiatus where on the one hand the hard path is dying of an incurable attack of marker forces, and on the other hand the soft path, although it's oozing up through the cracks, isn't yet a coherently shared public vision. Appropriate solar technologies get upwards of 90 per cent approval ratings in virtually every national poll, while things like nuclear power come in dead last. There's a consensus but not a coherent vision of how the pieces fit together.
How did your "coherent vision' of the energyproblem evolve?
A.L.: During the early seventies, the conventional view of the energy problem where to get more energy, of any kind, from any source, at any price was leading us to places we wouldn t want to be when we got there. We were merely seeKing to find, dig up, and burn fossil fudfaster and faster, a sort of strength through exhaustion." H.L.: It used to be believed that the G.N.P. could not go up unless energy use went up and that they went up roughly 'D tandem.
A.L.: It was the most asinine view, that energy and the G.N.P. marched forever lockstep. We now know there's no relation between them within very widei limits. The real conceptual breakthrough was realizing the power of starting analysis not with needing more energy with, What do we need it for? What is the amount and source and type of energy that will do in the cheapest way each of the many tasks that we want done with energy: comfort, light, ability to make steel, bake bread, and so on? If there was one key difference between our way of looking at the energy problem and the previous ways, that was it the "end-use" orientation. H.L.: Think of it in household terms. There is a role for brandy and caviar, but once you have the amount of them that can satisfy your needs, you don't want to keep buying brandy and caviar they're very expensive.
A.L.: And they're not for all uses. There are some things for which you'll want cheese and potatoes.
H.L.: Electricity is a very special and expensive form of energy. There are certain tasks you can't do without it. So for them, it's worth buying electricity. But we now supply more electricity than can be used in those tasks, so it's not worth buying even more electricity. You'd have to use it for tasks you don't need it for, like heating houses. It's better to buy cheaper forms of energy to heat houses.
A.L.: We've also had very rapid progress in technologies to bring more work out of our energy. We now have, for example, very cost-effective ways to double the efficiency of industrial electric motors, treble that of lights, quadruple that of household appliances, quintuple that of cars, and improve that of buildings by 10- to 100-fold in a way that doesn't change lifestyles but does save a lot of money. Solar heat, if done right, can provide comfort in your house more cheaply than oil, gas, or electricity could. Cheaper still would be to tighten and insulate the house to the point where you could heat it with a couple of 40-watt children.
Have your ideas won wide exposure or acceptancein the business sector?
A.L.: Yes, but it takes time to get the word out. Most of the exciting new technical developments are not reported in the literature most energy experts read. They're reported in things like Soft EnergyNotes and the various appropriate technology newsletters and journals. There's a big gulf in communications between that network and the more traditional one. That gulf is starting to break down so much so, for example, that in 1980, Southern California Edison Company, which was one of our earliest and most vociferous critics, announced they were now going to pursue efficiency and renewables vigorously as their primary options because these were now the cheapest things to do.
You also have argued that the soft path is amore secure option, as well as cheaper.
H.L.: We now have an energy system that can be turned off by a handful of people. The oil system, the electric and the natural gas systems all can be turned off, more or less at whim. A.L.: Domestic oil is in many ways as vulnerable as foreign oil. Gas and power plants are probably worse. A few people in one evening, without leaving Louisiana, could cut off three-quarters of the gas or oil to the Eastern states for more than a year. This could also happen, not through terrorism, but through natural disaster or technical accident.
H.L.: In our book, Brittle Power: EnergyStrategy for National Security, we ask, "Is it possible to design an energy system that is incapable of large-scale failure?" It turns out that it is. We identify about 20 design principles that let you design an energy system that simply can't be turned off by malfunction or sabotage.
A.L.: We got a lot of our principles of resilient design from biology, which has been doing this for several billion years. H.L.: Individuals can reduce their vulnerability and energy costs even in the middle of New York City. People in neighborhoods in Manhattan or a suburban neighborhood or rural region can get' themselves together and start thinking about where their energy comes from, what they are using it for, where they can get local sources of energy, and what they could do in the event of a cutoff. It's just a matter of adding up what the needs are and what the options are.
In Franklin County, Massachusetts the poorest county in the commonwealth people got together a couple years ago to do a study of how they were using energy. Each household in 1975 was sending out about $1,300 a year for energy, most of that going straight to Venezuela to buy oil 523 million a year leaving Franklin County, about the same as the payroll of the ten largest employers in the county. In the year 2000, if the county met the most optimistic forecasts of energy needs and energy prices, it would be four times worse off, sending out about 55,300 of today's dollars per household to pay for energy. To have enough money in the county to generate that cash flow, their single largest employer would have to duplicate itself every couple of years from now to the turn of the century. Looked at that way, the future isn't possible.
So the people looked at what they could do instead. They could stuff up the little cracks in each house that, taken together, amount to about a square yard of holes. They could use passive and active solar, wind and microhydropower. They have so many small dams in that county they could meet their energy needs six times over. They could provide methanol for their vehicles from the sustained yields of some of the unallocated public woodlots. Add up what all that costs, and it comes to about $23 million a year the same as they were then paying for energy. The difference is that before they had a bucket with a hole in it, and now they have plugged the hole. The money stays home; the jobs and the economic multiplier effects stay in Franklin County.
If you have someone bleeding to death, you can hook them up to a bloodbank or you can stop the bleeding.
What role is there for utilities in thesecommunities?
H.L.: Most utilities are now virtually bankrupt. The only thing that they can afford is to have their consumers getting more efficient and using renewable resources. The way we see this implemented is by the utilities taking what small amount of money they still have which on a national scale is a fair amount . . .
A.L.: . . . two billion dollars a year . . . H.L.: . . . and loan that money out to their customers anytime their consumers can save energy or use renewable energy cheaper per kilowatt than the utility could to build a power plant. The money would then be repaid to the utility out of the user savings so customers wouldn't need any of their own money up front. Pipe dream? Forty per cent of the generating capacity in the country now belongs to utilities doing or about to do these loans.
A.L.: We really are trying to keep the utilities solvent, both by helping them divert their investments into something where they can make money and by keeping them from going broke by building power plants they can't afford and don't need.
Is there a point when you will turn your attentionaway from the energy problem?
A.L.: Yes, we're trying to do that already. Energy is conceptually solved There are some interesting questions of implementation left, but the field has a lot of good people working out the solutions So we want to start applying what we learned about energy to the resource problems particularly water and soil fertility that by the end of this decade will make energy look pretty trivial. We also want to work on peace problems.
Soil fertility and water?
H.L.: We've been making all the samemistakes in water policy that we used to make with energy. The problem is defined as "We're running out of water." Thus, the answer is, "We need more of it." Worse, we're seeing all kinds of water as alike, so we're flushing toilets with drinking-quality water.
A.L.: That's about the same as heating houses with electricity.
H.L.: We're pursuing illusory economics of scale. We're charging ourselves for new water perhaps a tenth or a hundredth of what it really costs, and we're deceived into under-investing in "water productivity." We don't even know how much water we really need. These mistakes are already well understood in energy polity where we've learned how to correct them. So perhaps those same lessons can be applied to water policy to make that problem easier to deal with . . .
A.L.: . . . even something as straightforward as figuring out whether a new watersupply project is the cheapest way to provide water services. If you can do the same job cheaper by increasing your water productivity then that's where the money should be spent same as with energy, H.L.: The soil fertility problem seems to be with agriculture as a whole. The breaking of the soil leads to erosion. Despite knowing how to conserve soil, we no» have greater erosion than during the Bowl years. That in turn couples with wa ter policy, which in turn couples wither. ergy policy, so that in many areas of the Great Plains we're using very expensiw electrical energy to pump up fossil ground water to pour all over the fields to wash the soil away.
Just as with energy in the 19605, one can point to the problems. Now the job is to find some solutions.
