Temperatures dropped far below freezing this week in Snowmass, Colorado. But Amory Lovins, who lives high up in the mountains at 7,200ft above sea level, did not even turn on the heating.
That’s because he has no heating to turn on. His home, a great adobe and glass mountainside eyrie that he designed in the 1980s, collects solar energy and is so well insulated that he grows and harvests bananas and many other tropical fruits there without burning gas, oil or wood.
Nicknamed the “Einstein of energy efficiency”, Lovins, an adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, has been one of the world’s leading advocates and innovators of energy conservation for 50 years. He wrote his first paper on climate change while at Oxford in 1968, and in 1976 he offered Jimmy Carter’s government a blueprint for how to triple energy efficiency and get off oil and coal within 40 years. In the years since there is barely a major industry or government that he and his Rocky Mountain Institute have not advised.
But for much of that time efficiency was seen as a bit of an ugly sister, rather dull compared with a massive transition to renewables and other new technologies. Now, he hopes, its time may have come. Lovins is arguing for the mass insulation of buildings alongside a vast acceleration of renewables. “We should crank [them] up with wartime urgency. There should be far more emphasis on efficiency,” he says.
He sees Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine as an outrage, but possibly also a step towards solving the climate crisis and a way to save trillions of dollars. “He has managed to bring about all the outcomes that he most feared, but he may inadvertently have put the energy transition and climate solutions into a higher gear. Whether or not we end up in a recession because of the disruption, [Putin’s war] may prove to be a great thing for climate economics.” As it happens, Lovins has family connections to Ukraine: all four of his grandparents were early 20th-century immigrants from small villages between Kyiv and Odesa. He has one relative left there; the rest, as far as he knows, were murdered in the 1941 massacre of Tarashcha, when a Jewish population of nearly 14,000 was slaughtered by the Nazis, leaving just 11 people who happened to be off in the woods gathering mushrooms that day.
“Solar and wind are now the cheapest bulk power sources in 91% of the world, and the UN’s International Energy Agency (IEA) expects renewables to generate 90% of all new power in the coming years. The energy revolution has happened. Sorry if you missed it,” he says.
But just as with the 1970s oil shocks, the problem today is not where to find energy but how to use it better, he says. The answer is what he calls “integrative, or whole-system, design,” a way to employ orthodox engineering to achieve radically more energy-efficient results by changing the design logic.
Take his house, he says. By designing it to collect energy and to need no heating, it saves 99% of the space- and water-heating energy, and 90% of the electricity. “And it’s cheaper to build and saves construction costs,” he adds.
“It turns out that if you make [a] car out of carbon fibre, you also save two-thirds of the investment in water and half the energy space and time needed to put the car together. And it needs a lot fewer batteries because it’s holding less weight because the carbon fibre is light. You pay for the carbon fibre by needing fewer batteries and smaller propulsion system all round.
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