The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins
(Page 10 of 15)
November/December 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
PLOWBOY: How do you answer critics who say that energy storage is a major problem with soft technologies?
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LOVINS: I think they've got it backwards. Energy storage is a major problem with hard technologies. It's a minor problem with soft technologies. The reason for this is that with soft technologies, you aren't trying to electrify everything or store large amounts of energy. You would instead be trying—where you needed storage— to store energy at the point of end use, in rather small amounts, and often at rather low quality. Now it's very simple to store low-temperature heat ... you can do it in water or rocks. There might be more elegant ways to do it, but you don't need them.
Again, let's go through the kinds of energy we're talking about. Low- and high-temperature heat would be stored as heat, at the point of end use. That's easy. Liquid fuels would be stored as liquid fuels. That's easy . . . we're already doing it. Electricity would be stored as water behind existing dams. We're already doing that too. That's all there is, except maybe for mechanical energy, which you can always store as compressed air.
PLOWBOY: Compressed air? That's not very practical, is it?
LOVINS: Ithink it is. Some European cities—Paris and Vienna, for example—used to offer compressed air as a standard utility. It ran all the motors in those towns until the turn of the century, when electricity took over. Compressed air is actually a very highly developed technology. I recently looked in the Yellow Pages of the phone book in a large American city, under the heading "Compressed Air", and there were something like six pages of listings!
Compressed air is very handy stuff. It's exceedingly simple and reliable. It's spark-proof, which—of course—is why it's used so much in mining. And it has good torqueing characteristics ... air-powered wrenches are used, for example, in car assembly. Of course, it's also used there because if the workers were to steal the tools and take them home, they wouldn't be able to use them.
Anyway, I think compressed air has been much underrated as an energy carrier.
PLOWBOY: Granted that what you've been saying about soft technologies is true, who's going to bear the cost of deploying small-scale, decentralized technologies?
LOVINS: Well in some cases, individual homeowners themselves will. They're already doing it. In Vermont, for example, about 40% of all the houses in the state have been back-fitted by their owners with woodburning stoves in the past three years. There wasn't a program to do this ... people just did it, because they had the incentive and the opportunity.
Now it's true that if you want to retrofit your house with an active solar heating system it's going to cost you a lot more than a wood stove would, but I think there's a rather simple way around that. It's called a "capital transfer scheme", and it's mentioned in President Carter's energy plan. Here's how it works: If you want to insulate your roof, say, or put up a solar collector, your local utility will lend you the money to do it, and they'll give you the money on the same terms at which they would otherwise lend themselves the money to build power stations. You would repay the loan through your utility bill at your own rate of return, so that your bill wouldn't go up. In fact, once you paid off the loan, your bill would go down since you'd be using less gas, electricity, or whatever. But meanwhileuntil then—you'd be paying the same monthly payments you would have paid if you hadn't installed the equipment at all.
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