The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins
(Page 7 of 15)
November/December 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
PLOWBOY: Hold it ... you mean that all the uses of electricity in this country add up to only four percent of our total energy demand?
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LOVINS: No, eight percent. If you count industrial electric motors, only eight percent of our total energy needs are of the kind that must be met with electricity. It turns out, thoughbecause we're using electricity for a good many inappropriate, low-grade purposes—that we're actually meeting 13% of our present energy needs with electricity.
Now bear in mind that the conversion of coal energy into electrical energy is very wasteful. It turns out that for every three units of coal energy—or oil energy, or whatever—you put into a power plant, you only get one unit of electrical energy out. The other two units are lost as heat ... that's just a law of physics. Right now, about a third of U.S. fossil fuels goes to make the electricity we use to meet 13% of our energy needs. And a hard energy path would increase this 13% figure to between 20% and 40% by the year 2000 ... far more thereafter.
We're going to have to learn to do more with less. But that doesn't necessarily mean we'll have to give up a lot of things that are dear to us.
But there's no need to do that. If you match the quality of energy supplied to the quality needed for the task at hand—if you use electricity only for those applications that require electricity—you can save one heck of a lot of fossil fuel, because you can virtually eliminate the horrendous losses involved in converting energy from one form to another. What we've been trying to do in this country, you see, is supply the highest possible quality of energy for everything, whether we need it or not. But we can't afford to do that anymore. It's messy, inelegant, expensive, and dangerous. It's like cutting butter with a chain saw.
PLOWBOY: A couple minutes ago you mentioned that soft technologies are also matched in scale to end-use needs. What does that mean?
LOVINS: It means that where we want to create temperature differences of tens of degrees—as in heating a home—we should meet the need with power sources whose potential is tens or hundreds of degrees, rather than burning fossil fuels at thousands of degrees, or trying to confine nuclear reactions that have an effective temperature of trillions of degrees. To do otherwise is both wasteful and expensive.
If you want proof of this, just look at your electric bill. At least half your monthly payment goes for fixed distribution costs and related overhead: transmission lines, transformers, cables, meters, meter readers, planners, billing computers, etc. Half of your bill. The generation of electricity on a domes tic or neighborhood scale would eliminate—or at least greatly reduce —these distribution costs.
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