Date published: 2009/05/07
Amory Lovins (of the Rocky Mountain Institute) gave a talk in Cambridge today at the Engineering Department (but sponsored by the Cambridge Network). Being American and being fairly successful in his line of business (a consultant on energy matters) it is not very surprising that he is a good salesman. But even if you believe only half of his sales pitch, he's still doing some wonderful work in energy efficiency.
The main point of his talk was that if you look at energy systems end to end and design things intelligently, then you can save 40% and more (so even up to 90% and more) of the energy currently required in these systems. So he stressed in particular looking at both capitol expenditure (capex) and operating expenditure (opex), because it is always too easy to ignore one or the other when designing something. Well that is obvious but unfortunately most of the academic middle class never get that far. (So a related point is that even though some things might be "zero carbon" emissions from an operating point of view, that ignores the considerable carbon emissions to build and install everything in the first place.)
And the proof is in the pudding. And he showed real life cases, which hopefully are representative and not just cherry-picked. Most of the slides he used were just ones he presented in some lectures at Stanford (and no doubt before that), and those contain the real life cases he mentioned.
This is a big departure from the usual sales pitch of UK so-called environmentalists, who seem to spend all their time and effort trying to claim that the workers "consume" too much and therefore the solution to the world's environmental problems is to make the workers poorer (i.e. consume less). Lovins, to his credit, did not even come close to pushing that line. His interest genuinely seemed to be to make the world able to accomplish more for less, and he was putting his money where his mouth was, again in contrast to most UK so-called environmentalists, who are very good at writing Word documents but are incapable of actually doing anything useful.
At the end there were some questions. Someone (well, the head of the department) asked whether energy was "too cheap". Again, this is a fixation of the UK academic middle class. So the idea is that if only energy could be made expensive (so they are happy if oil prices sky-rocket) then emissions would be less. Unfortunately making the world poorer is not really an attractive proposition (except to the academic middle class), and Lovins gave this idea short shrift. He would rather just make the world more efficient.
Ont thing Lovins did not mention is that even if, say, the energy requirements of all current systems were reduced by 50%, it does not mean that the energy usage of the world would drop by 50%, because of course people would have extra money to spend on consuming energy in other, novel, ways. Well, there is nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, given that energy will unfortunately probably get a lot more expensive in the longer term, making our systems a lot more efficient might just mean that we break even.
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