Oct./Nov. 1983 RAIN Page 13 off guard, including us. Today's highest forecasts of U.S. energy needs in the year 2000 are well below the lowest unofficial forecasts made a decade ago, and they're still plummeting. But even more profound is the change in attitudes. As recently as 1974, ex cathedra pronouncements from such places as the Chase Manhattan Bank held that aside from curtailing holiday driving or television viewing, there was no scope for saving energy in the American economy: energy and GNP must spiral steeply upwards in a frenehc embrace. Today, however, it takes a fifth less energy than it did then to make the National Product a dollar grosser. The ratio continues to free-fall by several percentage points each year, with no end in sight. Indeed, it's now clear that the U.S., and the world, have barely scratched the surface of how much energy efficiency is available and worth buying. New ways to save energy emerge at a dizzying pace, each lasting perhaps six or eight months before being outdated by a better one. Energy efficiency and renewables are now among the fastest-growing sectors of the national and world economies. Their annual sales total tens of billions of dollars, and their markets are the target of international competition that is making the car business look tame. In 1976-77, the concept of a soft energy path based on efficiency and appropriate renewables was greeted by howls of derision: the technologies didn't, couldn't, exist. Within a year, the technologies were acknowledged to exist but were claimed to be uneconomic. After two years' further debate about costs, most crihcs conceded the technologies were indeed economic (given careful shopping); the problem, they said, was that people wouldn't buy them. But that question has been settled empirically by a national experiment conducted since 1979, when the Iranian revolution brought to many sectors the first real price rises (and new motives of independence, security, and sticking it to the Ayatollah). Since 1979, Americans have gotten more than a hundred times as much new energy from savings as from all expansions of energy put together, even though energy supply got six Hmes as much investment and 10-20 times as much government subsidy. Moreover, of those supply expansions, more new energy came from renewable sources than from any or all of the nonrenewables. Renewable sources, which were supposed to be unable to do anything much in this century, now provide nearly 8 percent of this country's total primary energy, and the fastest-growing part. We're getting about twice as much delivered energy from wood as from nuclear power (which had a 30-year, $40-billion head start); and since 1979, more new generating capacity has been ordered from small hydro and windpower than from coal or nuclear plants or both, without even counting their cancellations. Indeed, no central power plant of any kind has been ordered in the U.S. since 1981. The revolution has already happened unnoticed, through a quiet reallocation of priorities and capital. Just in 1980, Americans spent some $15 billion on efficiency and renewables—a fifth of all energy investment. But you ain't seen nothin' yet. The more people learn, the faster they'll buy. Or will they? Now the debate is moving to a new. more theological level: the critics say that although efficiency and renewables have swept the market so far, they will falter as easy opportunities give way to tough choices. In this view, the world will turn back to technologies now dying of an incurable attack of market forces (fission, synfuels) because nothing else will work long enough, big enough, universally enough. Well, maybe. But few of the skeptics are putting their own money where their mouths are. In recent weeks we have been approached by some of the world's largest builders of power stations, acknowledging that nobody wants to buy their product and asking what to make instead. There lies one of the challenges: How can institutions and people used to a few big products recycle themselves into making lots of much smaller ones? How can engineers enamored of gigantic, fancy, exotic technologies with brass knobs all over get excited about elegantly simple little things? How can construction managers used to multi-billion-dollar products settle for insulating innumerable roofs? Will financiers who get seven-figure commissions from giant projects see a future in zillions of home improvement loans? There are no easy answers. If the movement doesn't try to help, in a spirit of genuine sympathy, it will come to be seen as a gloating enemy by technologists suffering from the personal pain of revamping their skills and the disorientation of a jangled world view. Such a switch is never easy, and we owe it to skilled people, who in good faith devoted their careers to failed technologies, to make their transition easier. As the hard energy path has crumbled into a litter of failed megaprojects, the soft path has started growing up through the cracks. The initiative has come largely from individuals and community groups. They kept faith and worked hard. 'Their good ideas—and, equally importantly, their mistakes—spread with phenomenal speed via informal networks and grapevines. Astonishingly, many technical innovations came from people without technical training or institutional backup. (We got a note from a very smart man, with a rudimentary formal education, who had invented various energy devices to help him live in the Alaskan bush. His solar- tempered biogas plant balked at digesting paper, so he looked around his biome, noticed a moose eating a willow tree, recycled the moose, seeded his digester with moose-gut, and wrote us to report that his digester would now happily digest paper and even sizeable chunks of wood. He discovered something important, at least a cellulase enzyme and maybe a lignase, but he's not Exxon.) Spurred by the most powerful thing in the known universe—four billion minds wrapping around a problem—the pace of technical change has been impossibly swift. We've all needed loose-leaf minds. Remember the mid-seventies, when such unimpeachable sources as the Department of Energy said that passive solar heating, if it worked at all, could only be applied to specially designed new buildings? Hundreds of thousands of people who didn't know that now recline each February in their retrofit greenhouses, munching fresh tomatoes and reflecting on the infirmities of government. Or remember the ASHRAE 90-75 model building code, the fruit of endless deliberations by eminent energy-in-buildings engineers? It inadvertently out-
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