i. I I It's nice to have Amory Lovins, ubiquitous purveyor ofsoft energy paths, back in these pages again. Of course, his basic message- that we ccin indeed make the transition to a renewable energy society- has not changed. ,What has changed is the nature of the resistance to this inevitability-and the fact, as some see it, that we are already on our way. With this in mind, it might be timely to turn our attention from distant visions to those more immediate, most cost-effective steps in this transition: energy efficiency and conservation. As Amory's following remarks, excerpted from bis August speech to the Community Rerzewable Energy Systems conference in Boulder, make quite clear, we are only beginning to realize how much energy can be saved on an aggregate level by finetuning hundreds of energy conserving measures across the board. These first steps down the soft path can effectively forestall more nuke/synfuel follies, and give us the lead time we need to bring the good stuff on line. Here is Dr. Lovins GETTING EFFICIENT at his most inimitable! -SA by Amory Lqvins ... How much work can we wring from each unit of energy that is delivered to us? The conventional wisdom says that insulating our houses better, designing better appliances, better cars, better machinery in factories, we can save something like 20 to 40 percent of our energy and be just as well off, and indeed, that this is cheaper than new energy supply. I think this is pretty much well known. However, the conven- - tional wisdom is wrong. It comes from not looking quite carefully enough at how great the opportunities are for using energy more efficiently through what are called "technica_l fixes"-that i~, technical measures which are now economic by normal criteria, use today's (or quite often 1870's) technologies and have no significant effect on lifestyles. These are conventional measures.like better insulation., more efficient cars, and the like-except that if you look very carefully at • the best state-of-the-art right now, you find vastly greater opportunities for saving than anybody knew were there. This is something we have learned only within the past year. One of the first people to show this was Gerald Leach, who with his colleagues in England, diq a big study for the Ford Foundation (see below), in which they showed in quite a ratproof way ·that 1f you look carefully at more than 400 sectors of British energy use, and you use that energy more efficiently to do the same jobs, using conservation measures that are cheaper than present cheap North Sea gas, you can treble the ,energy efficiency of that country. You can do three times as much work, have three times the GNP, using the same amount of energy as now-or actually a little bit less. A colleague of mine has since dug into the numbers a little more thoroughly. He wanted originally to find out what would happen if you used conservation measures which, althoµgh they may not be cheaper than North Sea gas, are cheaper than the synthetic gas or new power stations Britain would otherwise have to use to replace the North Sea oil and gas that is going to run out. He found twice as much saving, a factor of 6. (This i5,actually what is repre~e_nted in Figure 1., We have assumed here a trebling of the Bnt1sh Gross Domestic Product. I happ~n to think that is spherically senseless-it Page 4 RAIN November 1979 makes·no sense no matter whi~h way you look at it-bµt I am going to assume it anyway to save argument.) Yet at the same time, the total energy used to treble econbmic activity, in the conventional heavy-industrial sense, drops by half-just through technical fixes. We have since had similar results from a number of other countries, for example West Germany, which is already considered more energy'-efficient chan the United States. I think the lesson is that when we start looking at hundreds of individual little energy uses through the economy the opportunities for saving add up in ways we never expected. Of course, there has also been very ·rapid technical progress. We now know, for example, how to make an economically and aesthetically attractive house in essentially any climate which does not tak~ any energy to heat. We know how to A "Soft" Energy Path for the United Kingdom, David Olivier, Earth Resources Research, Ltd., 11/78 (Preliminary). , Figure 1. make cars, quite straightforwardly, that are five times as efficient as the average American car, and we can do a lot better than that without pushing technology very hard.
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