The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins
(Page 9 of 15)
November/December 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
Soft technologies are diverse... rely on renewable energy flows... are understandable... and are matched in scaleand energy quality to end-use needs.
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LOVINS: Well, there's a very important class of transitional technologies that use something called fluidized bed combustion, which is a very clean and efficient way to burn practically any fuel. Last May, I visited a fully commercial fluidized bed district heating plant in Enkoping, Sweden, and to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, this plant will burn any kind of fuel: oil, gas, coal, wood, peat, trash, even my energy studies ... it doesn't much care. It will meet Swedish air quality standards, which are tougher than ours, even using high-sulfur coal and no add-on scrubbers. It has a complete two-year guarantee, and there were five international vendors competing to supply the hardware. Most fluidized bed "experts" in this country either haven't heard about the Enkoping plant, or tell me that such a thing couldn't exist yet. They just haven't done their homework.
Then too, there are many proven, worthwhile solar devices on the market or just coming on the market. If I were building a solar house, I think there's enough of a range of solar hardware available now that I could do a good job, although—of course—if it's a new house, I'd want to make it a passive design and just use the heat from people, lights, appliances, and windows, rather than special collectors.
Wind machines are coming into their own now, too. There's a 200kilowatt vertical-axis machine in the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, for instance. It's on the Hydro-Quebec grid. And it's proving to be reasonably economic. I think we'll be seeing a great many more such machines in the near future!
We also already have the technology for converting farm and forestry wastes to fuel alcohols ... these processes have been used for a long time in countries like Finland. Here, I'm afraid I don't have much sympathy for proposals to create big monocultural plantations of special crops that would be harvested and made into methanol. That's just unnecessary. Because if you take all the farm and forest wastes that are already available and convert them using wellestablished processes—to fuel alcohols, you wind up with enough fuel to run the whole transportation sector of the U.S. economy at the best European efficiencies of today ... which is to say, about a factor of three better than we now do.
Now the interesting thing is, we've just covered nearly all the needs of the U.S. energy system. Because all there is is low-temperature heat for buildings, medium- and high-temperature process heat for factories, liquid fuels for vehicles, and electricity. And practically all the electricity we need can come from the existing network of hydro stations ... we don't even need to convert fuels to electricity.
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