Amory and Hunter Lovins: Spokespersons for a Sustainable-energy Future
(Page 4 of 15)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
For example, the best and most cost-effective technologies presently available can double the efficiency of jet aircraft or of industrial electric motors and their drivetrains (saving enough electricity to displace every nuclear power plant in the country) ... treble the efficiency of steel mills ... quadruple the efficiency of household appliances and light bulbs ... and quintuple the efficiency of cars. (Two years ago, Volkswagen tested an 80 MPG city/100 MPG highway Rabbit without even using all the best available — or most cost effective — technology.) And the best new buildings use about a tenth to a hundredth as much energy as the older buildings that are all around us. That means if you put up a new building requiring significant energy for space conditioning, you haven't used the best state of the art — whether you're in Miami or Fairbanks.
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Since 1979, the United States has actually gotten more than a hundred times as much new energy from savings as from all net expansions of supply put together. That is, millions of individual actions in the marketplace — people weatherizing buildings, getting more efficient cars, plugging up steam leaks, and so on-have together provided over a hundred times as much new energy as all of the new oil and gas wells, coal mines, and power plants built in the same period, even though the latter got about six times as much capital investment and about ten or twenty times as much subsidy. This fact tells us that it's faster to do lots of small, simple things that are accessible to everyone and that have very short construction times, than to build a few big, complicated projects that cost billions of dollars and take ten years to complete.
Having discussed efficiency improvements a little bit, let's focus for a moment on the other new winner in the energy marketplace: appropriate renewable sources, which we call "soft technologies." In analyzing what soft technologies can do and at what cost, we've assumed only the presently available technologies in active and passive solar heating, passive cooling, high-temperature solar heat for industry (which we now know how to collect on a cloudy winter day), efficiently converting farm and forestry wastes into liquid fuels to run efficient vehicles (taking great care to protect soil fertility in the process), present hydropower, small hydropower, and wind power.
Soft technologies are not cheap, but they are cheaper than not having them. They cost less, even in capital cost, than the things you'd otherwise have to buy — power plants, synfuel plants, and so on — to do the same task. They can also meet essentially all the long-term energy needs in every country studied so far, including the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, West Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan — countries which are variously cold, cloudy, at a high latitude, densely populated, and heavily industrialized.
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