The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins
(Page 8 of 15)
November/December 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
Actually, by using quite orthodox economics, one can show that nowadays it costs less overall to build a lot of little power stations than it does to construct one huge one. This may come as a surprise to power engineers who were brought up to think in terms of classical economies of scale, but those theories don't hold water anymore.
PLOWBOY: Could you give me an example?
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LOVINS: Well, for instance: Big generating stations— contrary to what their designers expected—are turning out to be a lot less reliable than small ones. The bigger they are, in fact, the less reliable they are. Also, the big stations' unreliability is a much more grievous fault than it would be in a small station because of the fact that you have to provide instant backup capability for those times when the station fails, and it becomes very difficult and expensive to provide that backup capacity on a large scale.
Then too, the big power stations take a long time to build compared to small ones ... which means they're more vulnerable to longterm interest charges, cost escalations, changes in political climate resulting in design alterations midway through construction, pressure from labor unions, and mistimed demand forecasts ... which is where it turns out that you've built the thing before you really need it and—as a result—it just sits there, eating up loan interest. When you start to add up some of these "diseconomies of scale"—if you willyou find that big stations just don't make economic sense ... let alone any other kind.
PLOWBOY: You don't think, then, that big power stations have a place in the country's energy system?
LOVINS: I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying, rather, that they have an important but limited place which they've already long since filled, and that we can take advantage of the big systems we've got without building more of them. The electric grid we now have, for example, is going to be around for a long time and will prove very useful during the transition to a soft path. But we don't need any more big electric generating stations. We already have about twice as much electricity as we can use to advantage.
And I'd be the last person to say that everything has to be small. It's just as silly—in my opinion—to try to run a smelter with wind machines as it is to heat houses with fast breeder reactors. The object is to crack nuts with nutcrackers and to drive pilings with triphammers, not the reverse.
PLOWBOY: You speak of "the transition to a soft path". What are some of the technologies— soft and otherwise—that you see us using during this transition? What "alternative" technologies exist that we can and should implement right now?
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