The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins
(Page 6 of 15)
November/December 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
PLOWBOY: They rely on energy that's always going to be there whether we use it or not.
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LOVINS: Yes. Third, they are relatively understandable, or what Ivan Illich would call convivial. That is, although an ordinary person wouldn't necessarily be able to build a particular soft energy device or have a detailed knowledge of what goes on inside it, he or she would be able to control it. It wouldn't be some mysterious giant lurking over the horizon, but rather an item of everyday activity that would be relatively understandable. My pocket calculator, for example, is technically a very sophisticated device, but I run it... it doesn't run me. That's the sort of social criterion I had in mind.
All right. The fourth and fifth defining characteristics of soft technologies are that they're matched in scale and in energy quality to end-use needs.
PLOWBOY: Perhaps you could explain what you mean by that ... by matching "energy quality" to end-use needs. What does that mean?
LOVINS: Well as you know, energy comes in many different forms, some of which are what a scientist would call "low grade" energy. That isn't a derogatory term ... it just means that the kind of energy in question— lowtemperature heat, usually— can't do difficult kinds of work. Now, there's an awful lot of low-grade energy around. There's more low-grade energy in the Atlantic Ocean, for instance, than there is highgrade energy in all the oil in the Middle East, but you can't do much with it.
By matching energy quality to end use needs, I simply mean that where you have a job that can be done by low-grade energy, you should use lowgrade energy to do that job, and not high-grade energy.
PLOWBOY: Is there much of a need for low-grade energy in this country?
LOVINS: Oh yes. About half of all the energy needed in the U.S. today is required in the form of heat at temperatures below a few hundred degrees Celsius. Altogether something like 58% of our end-use needs are for heat. And only a fraction of that 58% is high-temperature heat.
PLOWBOY: What about the other 42% of our end uses? What kinds of energy do we need there?
LOVINS: Well, about 31% of the remainder is liquid fuels for vehicles, mainly cars. About 3% of our energy is used to run pipelines. It takes a lot of energy to pump things around, you know, especially to pump fuels around. Industrial-type electric motors consume 4% of our energy ... and another 4% is used by all other electric devices: all lighting, electronics, telecommunications, smelting, electroplating, arc welding, electric drive for railways, and home appliances.
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