Environment / Alternative Energy

Lovins waters tropical plants in a hothouse
that serves as a "furnace" for his home/office
in Old Snowmass, Colorado, where
subfreezing temperatures are common
throughout the winter. Overhead windows
have special coatings that
let light through but reflect interior heat
. The pond is home to catfish, frogs, and crayfish.

AMORY LOVINS is a physicist, economist, inventor, automobile designer, consultant to 18 heads of state, author of 29 books, and cofounder of Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank. most of all, he's a man who takes pride in saving energy. The electricity bill at his 4,000-square-foot home in Old Snowmass, Colorado, is five dollars a month, and he's convinced he can do the same for all of us. his book winning the oil endgame shows how the united states can save as much oil as it gets from the persian gulf by 2015 and how all oil imports can be eliminated by 2040. And that's just for starters.

As told to Cal Fussman

When I give talks about energy, the audience already knows about the problems. That's not what they've come to hear. So I don't talk about problems, only solutions. But after a while, during the question period, someone in the back will get up and give a long riff about all the bad things that are happening—most of which are basically true. There's only one way I've found to deal with that. After this person calms down, I gently ask whether feeling that way makes him more effective.

As René Dubos, the famous biologist, once said, "Despair is a sin."

ENERGY

I used to work for Edwin Land, the father of Polaroid photography. Land said that invention was the sudden cessation of stupidity. He also said that people who seem to have had a new idea often have just stopped having an old idea. So I suppose if I bring something unusual to this business, it's that maybe I find it easier to stop having old ideas.

I can't point to any one moment in particular from my past that made me who I am. It's been more like seeing the world through an evolving lens. Gradually, I've learned to ask different questions and look at problems from different angles than most people.

I'm probably best known for having redefined the energy problem in 1976 with a Foreign Affairs article titled "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?"

Until then, the energy problem was generally considered to be: Where do we get more energy? People were preoccupied with where we could get more energy of any kind, from any sources, for any price—as if all our needs were the same. I started instead at the other end of the problem: What do we want the energy for?

You don't generally want lumps of coal or barrels of sticky black goo. You want comfort, illumination, mobility, baked bread, and so on. And for each of these end uses we should ask: How much energy, of what quality, at what scale, from what source will do the job in the cheapest way? That's now called the end-use/least-cost approach, and a lot of the work we do at Rocky Mountain Institute involves applying it to a wide range of situations.

End-use/least-cost analysis begins with a simple question: What are you really trying to do? If you go to the hardware store looking for a drill, chances are what you really want is not a drill but a hole. And then there's a reason you want the hole. If you ask enough layers of "Why?"—as Taiichi Ohno, the inventor of the Toyota production system, told us—you typically get to the root of the problem.

OIL

Let's start with one basic problem. Saudi Arabia has a quarter of the world's oil reserves. It is the sole swing producer with significant capacity to increase output, and therefore it controls the world price.

Two-thirds of Saudi oil flows through one processing plant and two terminals that are in the crosshairs of terrorists. That stuff could go down any day for a long time. And that would presumably crash both the House of Saud and the Western economy. So for the bad guys it's a twofer. They would love to do that, and they've already had a couple of cracks at it.

Now, this should make you uncomfortable. But we don't have to continue on our current path. We can go a different way.

Let's look at oil through a historic analogy. Around 1850, the biggest or second-biggest industry in America was whaling. Most buildings were lit with whale oil. But in the nine years before Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859 in Pennsylvania and made kerosene ubiquitous, at least five-sixths of the whale oil–lighting market had already been lost to competing products made from coal. This was elicited by the relatively high price of whale oil as the whales got shy and scarce.

The whalers were astounded that they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales. They didn't see this coming because they hadn't added up the competitors. Oil fields can be like this today.

The United States today wrings twice as much work from each barrel of oil as it did in 1975. With even more advanced technologies, we can double oil efficiency all over again at a cost averaging $12 a barrel. We can replace the rest of our oil needs with advanced biofuels and saved natural gas at a cost averaging $18 a barrel. Combined, these two approaches average out at a cost of $15 a barrel. That's a lot cheaper than the $61 per barrel oil was the other day or even the $26 that's officially forecast for the year 2025.

How much cheaper than $26 a barrel? Well, about $70 billion a year, plus a million jobs, mostly in rural and small-town America. Plus a million saved jobs now at risk, mainly in the automaking states.

We've got a choice: Either we're going to continue importing efficient cars to help replace foreign oil, or we're going to employ our own people to make efficient cars and import neither the oil nor the car—which sounds like a better idea.

WEIGHT

A modern car, after 120 years of devoted engineering effort since Gottlieb Daimler built the first gasoline-powered vehicle, uses less than 1 percent of its fuel to move the driver. How does that happen?

Well, only an eighth of the fuel energy reaches the wheels. The rest of it is lost in the engine, drivetrain, and accessories, or wasted while the car is idling. Of the one-eighth that reaches the wheels, over half heats the tires on the road or the air that the car pushes aside. So only 6 percent of the original fuel energy accelerates the car. But remember, about 95 percent of the mass being accelerated is the car—not the driver. Hence, less than 1 percent of the fuel energy moves the driver. This is not very gratifying.

Well, the solution is equally inherent in the basic physics I just described. Three-quarters of the fuel usage is caused by the car's weight. Every unit of energy you save at the wheels by making the car a lot lighter will save an additional seven units of fuel that you don't need to waste getting it to the wheels.

So you can get this roughly eightfold leverage (three- to fourfold in the case of a hybrid) from the wheels back to the fuel tank by starting with the physics of the car, making it lighter and with lower drag. And indeed you can make the car radically lighter. We've figured out a cost-effective way to do that so you can end up with a 66-mile-per-gallon uncompromised SUV that has half the normal weight, has a third the normal fuel use, is safer, and repays the extra cost that comes with being a hybrid in less than two years.

PLASTIC

An automotive seat bucket from Fiberforge,
a company chaired by Lovins, is ultralight
and ultrastrong. Carbon fibers
are laid into predetermined positions and
sandwiched with reinforcing nylon.
The flat, tailored blank is then
heated, stamped on a hot molding die,
cooled, and trimmed to produce
the finished part.

Henry Ford said you don't need weight for strength. If you did need weight for strength, your bicycle helmet would be made of steel, not carbon fiber. And if you want to know how strong a very light material can be, try eating an Atlantic lobster with no tools.

The auto industry needs to move toward ultralight, ultrastrong carbon-fiber composites, almost certainly using thermoplastics that flow when heated and that can be easily molded—instead of the more brittle, expensive thermosets that need chemistry, baking, or some other change to set the resin into its final hard form. Thermoplastics are incredibly tough. They can absorb 12 times as much crash energy per pound as steel. So even though your car will be only half as heavy as it was before, it will still be safer when whacked by a heavier one.

With such materials, you can decouple size from weight. You can make the car big—protected and comfortable. But it won't be heavy—hostile and inefficient. This can save oil and lives at the same time, and it turns out you can greatly improve the economics of making the car because you might have in a carbon SUV only 14 body parts—instead of 140 to 280 in a steel auto body—each needing one low-pressure die set, instead of an average of four high-pressure steel-stamping die sets in the steel body. The parts snap together precisely in the right positions for gluing, like assembling a kid's toy, so you don't need all those jigs and robots. You basically get rid of the body shop this way, and then by laying color in the mold, you get rid of the paint shop too. There go the two hardest and costliest parts of making the car.

New jobs come partly by having a vibrantly competitive car industry rather than a failing one and partly due to the logical evolution of the auto industry toward computerization. Imagine the aftermarket for improved and customized software. The industry structure would be different, but we don't think there would be a net loss of jobs. The jobs would be safer, healthier, and better distributed. And the same revolution that's coming to automaking from advanced materials also applies to anything else that moves.