Dr Amory Lovins talks about energy efficiency, transport and renewable energy

We're talking with Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute co-founder, chairman and chief scientist. He's an expert on energy use and energy efficiency. He's been advisor to industries in the US for many years and also advised the US Departments of Energy and Defense. He's also authored and co-authored many books on renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Amory Lovins podcast

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Scott Bilby: This Morning on Beyond Zero we're talking with Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute co-founder, chairman and chief scientist. He's an expert on energy use and energy efficiency. He's been advisor to industries in the US for many years and also advised the US Departments of Energy and Defense. He's also authored and co-authored many books on renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Welcome to the show Amory.

Amory Lovins: Thank you. G'day.

(Scott and Matt laughing)

Scott: G'day to you. A little bit about your past. You were working at Friends of the Earth in the UK. Can you tell us about working there and how the Rocky Mountain Institute got started?

Amory: That was a long time ago, just after I resigned a fellowship at Oxford because they wouldn't let me do a doctorate in energy. It wasn't considered an academic subject – now it is. But that was in '71, two years before the first oil shock. So I moved to London and David Brower, who's the greatest conservationist of the 20th century, asked me to be his representative from the US to the UK branch for Friends of the Earth, which was just in formation. They ran their own show; I just used it as a place to perch whilst cross-pollinating the energy grapevine across the Atlantic.

Actually, our next-door neighbor was Fritz Schumacher of “small is beautiful” fame. We had a tiny little office in Soho but I gradually shifted back across the Atlantic after ten years in London. My then wife Hunter and I set up Rocky Mountain Institute as an independent, entrepreneurial, public charity. It's a 'think-and-do tank' that creates abundance by design, working chiefly with the private sector on advanced energy and resource efficiency.

Scott: You've been speaking about energy efficiency and renewable energy and energy use full-stop for many years now. And as we mentioned previously you advise many people on that subject. Are you particularly positive about Barack Obama being inaugurated as President of the United States? Can you see finally everything you've been talking about really getting some traction now that he's in?

Amory: Our institute and I are scrupulously apolitical and non-partisan. But at the substantive level it is clear there's a strong resonance between his policies and what we've been suggesting for a long time. He's made some terrific senior appointments and I think they'll do very well in shifting towards much more efficient use of energy and more benign supplies.

Matthew Wright: He's certainly getting lobbied by Al Gore and Al Gore recently has launched a campaign called “We can solve it.” They're calling for a ten year transition to renewable energy, which is very ambitious. Can you tell us what your thoughts are on the possibility of that sort of transformation of the US energy economy?

Amory: Specifically I believe he was talking about electricity and a 10-year transition off fossil fuel for making electricity. At the moment about 70 % or a bit more of US electricity is made from fossil fuels, about 46% of the 100% (the total) is made from coal, which however counts for 92% of the electricity sector's carbon emissions.
I think it is actually very profitable to switch off coal to a combination of efficiency, some gas-fired combined heat and power, and mainly distributed renewables. In fact, distributed renewables plus CHP (Combined Heat and Power) together are now providing a sixth of the world's total electricity and a third of the world's new electricity. But the US lags with only 6% because we have special rules and practices which favor the incumbent monopolists and their big plants.

So I think those rules are probably going to change to allow full and fair competition, regardless of the size, type, location or ownership of the technology and whether it's for saving energy or producing more. If we really had that sort of competition, then the dramatic shift away from central, thermal power stations of any kind, and towards 'negawatts' and micro-power would accelerate dramatically.

Matthew: We love the term 'negawatts'. Can you explain that for listeners?

Amory: A 'negawatt' is a watt saved by either more efficient or more timely use. Most of what we're concerned with here when we're talking about saving carbon, would be the saved part that is wringing more work out of our kilowatt/hour by substituting technology and brains for fuel and money.

Scott: You've spoken about being able to replace a large percentage of current oil use, for example in the United States, by energy efficiency measures and you can replace the other half using renewable energy, so…

Amory: Actually, on the supply side, once you've saved half the oil, the other half does get displaced. But the slightly larger part of that displacement is using saved natural gas that you then substitute for oil in buildings and industry, then free up the oil for mobility.

However, whilst that's going on you just switch over to biofuels grown in a way that has nothing to do with the food system, and actually improves soil fertility and takes carbon out of the air and puts it back in topsoil, where it belongs.

Matthew: On the question of automobiles I understand you're involved in a company called Bright, (Bright Automotive)?

Amory: I helped spin it off. It's our fifth for-profit spin-off from the non-profit. It's a little company in Anderson, Indiana, in the industrial heartland, run by John Waters who was on our staff and previously had designed the battery packs at General Motors for the EV-1 and has ten electric vehicles.

He's gathered a remarkable team of about six or seven blokes who each have a quarter-century of senior experience at major automakers. So, unlike many people that are getting into the car business, they actually know how to do it. They've come up with a way to do a plug-in hybrid vehicle that's light and slippery enough that the batteries get about two-fifth smaller and cheaper. So, you can actually pay for them without subsidy. It's based on a business model, the company has real customers and real supply chains.

Matthew: That's a special, very lightweight composite involved, is there?

Amory: I can't talk about the materials, and I think there will be a variety of them, each doing what it does best but if you actually push this work we've been doing on advanced composites for the greatest weight saving in cars, you can make a mid-size sports utility vehicle (SUV), that weighs under 860 kilos. But it's safer than the present models weighing twice as much, even if they hit each other at high speed. The interesting thing is, not only do you save half the weight and half the fuel that way, but the car costs the same to make because the costlier materials are paid for by simpler automaking, cheaper tooling and a three-time smaller propulsion system to get the same brisk acceleration.

So you’d end up getting 3.6 litres per 100 kilometres running on petrol, or about 2.1 running on hydrogen fuel cell. Of course it also lends itself to per battery propulsion or plug-in hybrids.
Once you get the car light and slippery enough, any sort of advanced powertrain gets disproportionately more advantageous compared to a petrol engine.

Matthew: In those sorts of lightweight cars, once you convert from internal combustion engine to electric drive train I understand you save about 80% of the energy, just by changing drive trains.

Amory: At least half. It depends on the details. If you want a really nice example of how to do all this, look up a Toyota concept car shown in late 2007 called the 1/X, (pronounced “One Xth”). It's the interior volume of the Prius hybrid but it's got half the fuel use and a third of the weight. The whole thing is 420 kilos, twenty of which is extra batteries to make it a plug-in hybrid. That's because it's made of carbon fibre and it does have a little internal combustion engine, but it's just a half-litre and that tucks under the rear seat.

Matthew: And it still meets the crash standards?

Amory: Oh yes! (Chuckle) Those materials can absorb 6 to 12 times as much crash energy per kilo as steel.

Scott: Yes, I was fascinated to be watching a Youtube clip in which you were giving a presentation and it showed a McLaren, I think it was, that had crashed with another car. The other car was almost totalled and the McLaren had a bit of a dent and a scratch on the side. The McLaren was carbon fibre and the other car was just a standard car...

Amory: Sure. You just need to look at the videos that are also on Youtube of Formula 1 car crashes. They'll run into a wall at 250+ km/h, and they fall to bits, fly to bits and the driver typically emerges and limps away with at most a broken foot or so.

Matthew: Yes, it's amazing. We were talking about the efficiency there, but Melbourne is a city of trams and trains - unfortunately we haven't had any upgrades to our network for about 70 or 100 years. This very heavy rolling stock, which seems to be the norm, seems to be adding cost to something that's otherwise very efficient - getting 200 people in a common vehicle and driving it along. Can these composite materials be adapted to that sort of application?

Amory: They can. It's not quite as advantageous as if you are on rubber tires, but it is very advantageous to go ultra light, or even lightweight. A nice example of that is on the web, it's “cybertran.com”. It's a proposed ultralight rail network that's something like 5 or 10 times cheaper than standard light rail. I'd always thought the weight doesn't much matter if you've got steel wheels on steel rails, what matters more is air resistance for efficiency.

But actually it matters a great deal to cost because something like 80% or 85% of the cost of a rail network is very weight sensitive. Especially bridges, which have a lot of snowballing of weight.
So, if you're putting the thing up in the air, which a Cybertran is, you can actually put two lanes of it over the median of an existing motorway and handle the equivalent of four saturated lanes of traffic on it.

Scott: Talking about the carbon fibre composite reminds me of something else you were talking about on one of these Youtube clips I was watching. You spoke about advanced material production and propulsion, and the interest that the military has in those two things, and how that will provide a great leap ahead in civilian-society cars, trucks and planes. It will help wean them off oil.
Can you talk a bit more about that?

Amory: Yes, and if you want to read more about it you can Google “More fight, less fuel”, which is the title of a new Defense science report that came out in February.

It turns out that the Pentagon spends about a third of its budget and half its people moving things around – this is called logistics. About 70% of the tonnes they move are fuel. Half of the casualties in theatre now are associated with fuel convoys or other logistics, that's mostly fuel. And then the fuel is wasted because, when we designed and bought the things that used the fuel, we assumed that the logistics were free and invulnerable. So, the Pentagon has actually changed policy, (something I've been working on for many years), just a couple of years ago and it's starting to work through now into actual decision processes: they've changed so they'll value saved fuel at its fully burdened cost delivered to the platform, in theatre, in wartime. This means they'll value it typically ten and sometimes a hundred times more than before. That will drive competition amongst the military contractors to make land, sea and air platforms extremely fuel efficient. Of course you can then see the spin off potential back to the civilian sector, because among the things we’ve had lately from military R&D are the Internet, the Global Positioning System (GPS), the microchip industry and the jet engine industry.
It's a very powerful engine of innovation.

Scott: It's quite extraordinary what they've provided for the world. You say that the military very much values saved fuel. So, in the commercial sector how much is business valuing saved energy?

Amory: (Chuckle) Very little. Emitting carbon so far is free in the United States, thank you Australia for starting to lead in the other direction now.

Matthew: Only just.

Amory: Most industrial countries do price carbon and I think the US will shortly.
I think also because energy in most businesses is a very small part of the total cost of doing business, maybe 1% or 2%, most managers don't pay much attention. Even though of course if you saved a lot of that and dropped it straight to the bottom line, which is what happens to saved overheads, it would do wonders for your profits in lean times.

Efficiency is arguably the highest return/lowest risk investment in the whole economy. So, smart businesses are indeed cutting their energy intensity about 6% to 16% per annum just by fixing up what they've got. In our latest projects, some of them in Australia by the way where I've worked for many years, we're typically finding in 29 industrial sectors now, (over 30 billion US dollars worth of projects) about 30% to 60% energy saving is fixing old plants with paybacks of 2 or 3 years. And in new plants we can save more, typically 40% to 90%. But the capital cost of a plant almost always goes down, because we figured out integrated design that makes very big energy savings cost less than small savings. So we get expanding, not diminishing, returns to investments in advanced energy efficiency. If you want to know how to do that, go to www.rmi.org/stanford and you'll find my five public lectures just over a year ago at Stanford Engineering School covering buildings, transport and industry. It's 30 years condensed to 7 hours.

Matthew: We've highlighted some obvious transport energy efficiency savings with weights and aerodynamics and the drive train. What about our industry in regards to, say, steam, which seems to be a predominant use of energy? Also I saw something, you were talking about changing the configuration on those really big chemical plants where they pipes running everywhere. Can you explain what this is?

Amory: (Laugh) One of my favorite examples is actually an industrial pumping loop to move some fluid around in a circle for heat transfer. It turned out that one could save 92% of the pumping energy and reduce the construction cost just by using fat, short, straight pipes rather than thin, long, crooked pipes. This is not really rocket science, this is good Victorian engineering re-discovered. And we're actually hatching a plot for the non-violent overthrow of bad engineering.

The sorts of results we routinely get in industry, building and vehicle design would not be possible if they'd been designed right in the first instance. I'm getting rather annoyed with having to keep re-designing things that weren't designed right. So, we're going back to the roots of the problem which is how engineering is often taught with some exceptions, some of which I believe will turn up in Australia. You’ve got very clever people. I think we're finding that the teaching is generally not done right. So, we're hatching a plot called “10XE, Factor Ten Engineering”, to write a casebook of vivid, high-brain, velcro examples that will irreversibly rearrange the designer's mental furniture.

Matthew: So, what were the industrial chemists and industrial plant designers thinking in the first place?

Amory: Well, they were thinking that you needed to optimise, for example, the diameter of a pipe according to how much friction, and therefore how much pumping energy, you could save over the years which sounds perfectly reasonable. Except they left out the cost of the pumping equipment. You've got to pay for all kit: the pumps and inverters and electricals and motors, and make them big enough to overcome the friction. But it turns out friction in a pipe goes down as almost the fifth power of its diameter, the cost of the fatter pipe goes up as only about the second power of diameter.

So, if you use really fat pipes – or even a little fatter than normal, because of the fifth power – you pay a little more for the pipe but you save most of the CapX (capital cost) for the pumping equipment that gets dramatically smaller. So we end up with fat pipes, tiny little pumps and motors. Total capital cost goes down and it works better.

By the way, we figured out later we could have saved more like 98% by designing it even better, and it would have cost even less. So we'll do better next time.

Scott: So the fatter pipes require smaller pumps and fans. You had a good statistic: something like pumps and fans use 50% of motor power and...

Amory: ...and motors use 3/5th of the world's electricity.

Scott: Extraordinary. So there are huge savings to be made there.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about electricity supply. You’re talking about how low-carbon or zero-carbon sources of power – such as solar and wind – are better than large, centralised sources like coal, gas, nuclear and hydro these days.

Amory: Not better in some ideological sense but they cost less, they have lower financial risk, so they're better able to attract private investment. In fact, just decentralised renewable sources of electricity last year, or it’s now a year before last, got 90 billion US dollars of private investment. Nuclear for example got zero, it's only bought by central planners drawing on the public purse.

Also, it turns out that having numerous, diverse, dispersed sources of electricity makes supply a great deal more reliable and resilient. In fact, surprisingly, even if you rely quite heavily on variable resources like wind and solar cells, you can keep the lights on with the same reliability using less storage and backup than we've already installed and paid for to cope with the intermittence of the big thermal stations, which can drop out a billion watts instantly, usually for a long time and with no warning.

Matthew: It's a really big deal if one of those huge turbines at a coal plant actually trips off, and it does it in an instant, doesn't it?

Amory: That's right, But if you have a diversified set of renewables spread out in different places so the weather that's bad for one is good for another and they're not all off at the same time, in fact they're mostly on at the same time and if one fails it's not a big deal, then your reliability actually improves.

That's also because they're nearer the customer and it turns out, at least in the US - you can check the number in Australia – but here 98% or 99% of the power failures actually originate in the grid. So, if you want reliable power you'd better make it at or near the customers.

Matthew: Also on energy efficiency: housing. I understand that there's been a big refit of your premises that you built 20 or 30 years ago and you've got induction cooktops and all sorts of things.

Amory: Actually not induction, we've got something 60% more efficient than that. It's a new technology from Switzerland. We made a lot of changes. The original design that I did in the early '80s saved about 99% of the space and water heating energy, 90% of the household electricity, which for 372 m² would cost about 5 US dollars a month if we bought it, but actually we make more out of our solar and sell the rest back.

Those efficiencies, plus saving half the water, paid for themselves in the first ten months with 1983 technology. Now we're retrofitting quite extensively to show off the latest technologies 25 years later. We didn't want to be a museum, but to show cutting-edge stuff from all around the world. Now we have a new design goal, and that's to take as much carbon out of the air as possible by having a fossil fuel-free house, we hope even a combustion-free house. We'll see whether we can get rid of the woodstoves that do the last 1% of the space heating.
I should explain I'm up in the Rockies where we go to – 44C at 2200 metres. You can get frost any day of the year and yet I've grown 28 banana crops here with no furnace. It's cheaper to build that way. We're just hatching out our next banana crop.

I think the new technologies are quite astonishing.We're doing our fifth lighting retro-fit, mostly LEDs this time, our first day lighting retro-fit, doubling the size of the active solar hot water system so it can also heat some radiant slab coils that I put in in '83 but never hooked up. Now we are hooking them up to try and get rid of the woodstoves and turn their flues into light pipes. We put in probably the most efficient ventilation heat recovery ever built, and this super-efficient cooktop, some very efficient new clothes washing and drying stuff and going to improve that further. Also about a 150 point digital data acquisition system, so in some months you should be able to watch all the data unfold on the web.

Scott: Amory, we've discovered a few interesting facts about energy and energy efficiency and stuff and we've also discovered 20 minutes is nowhere near long enough to speak to someone as interesting as you, but unfortunately we've run out of time.

Amory: Oh, it's a pity but thank you for having me. Go to rmi.org and you'll find lots of interesting things.

Matthew: We certainly hope to get you back on the show some time later in the year, perhaps.

Amory: Good, thank you very much.

Scott: Thank you very much. That was Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute co-founder, chairman and chief scientist. He's an expert on energy use and energy efficiency and he's been an advisor to industry for many years. He's also been advisor to the US Departments of Energy and Defense. He's authored many books. You might want to visit the Rocky Mountain Institute website at rmi.org. You can also visit the oilendgame.com website for a book called “Winning the oil end game”, co-authored by Amory and available for free download.

You’re listening to Beyond Zero. If you want to find out more about Beyond Zero Emissions go to www. beyondzeroemissions.org.

Transcript by Jean Dind