Amory and Hunter Lovins: Spokespersons for a Sustainable-energy Future
(Page 5 of 15)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
You don't have to accept on faith our calculations that soft technologies are cheaper than hard technologies: Just look at how they're succeeding in the marketplace. Since 1979, they've supplied more new energy than oil, gas, coal, and uranium ... and we've had more electric capacity ordered from small hydro, and wind power than from coal or nuclear power plants or both (without counting canceled plants). The U.S. is now getting about twice as much delivered energy from wood as from nuclear power, which had a head start of 30 years and over $65 billion in direct subsidies.
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Renewables, which weren't supposed to be able to do anything in this century, now supply about 8% of our total primary energy, and the fastest growing part. For instance, in just a few years, California utilities have been offered power from privately financed, dispersed plants — more than half of them renewable — totaling six reactors' worth of electricity and increasing by one reactor-equivalent per quarter.
Now, some people question the reliability of renewable power sources. But remember, every power source is intermittent. Different renewables, though, tend to fail at different times. A storm, for instance, is bad for photovoltaic power generation but good for hydro and wind power. And in every place analyzed so far, you can add up two of those three sources and get a firmer source of energy than large power plants offer now.
Renewable sources also tend to stop working for shorter periods than nonrenewable ones. A major outage in a light-water nuclear reactor lasts an average of 300 hours, at zero output. And each reactor is so large — 1,000 megawatts — that you need an equally big amount of reserve for when it does go out. (You got to have another elephant to pull away the one that died in the drawing room.)
Another reason for the higher reliability of renewables is that when they cannot work, it is for fairly predictable reasons (such as cloudiness, the daily rotation of the earth, etc.). But when non renewable sources cannot work, it is for reasons that are much harder to predict ... such as terrorism, reactor accidents, or strikes. We have a lot more confidence that the sun will rise tomorrow than that somebody won't blow up the Saudi Arabian oil terminals today.
UTILITY WOES . . .
In this country, out of all the energy delivered to where it's used, 58% is required as heat, mainly at low temperatures. Another 34% is required as liquid fuels to run vehicles. Only 8% is needed for all the special, premium uses that require electricity and that can give us our money's worth out of it. Electricity is a high-quality, expen sive form of energy, typically equivalent in terms of heat content to buying oil at over $100 a barrel — three times what we're paying the Arabs now. Expensive stuff. If we were to use such a costly form of energy for running lights, motors, electronics, smelters, things that really need it — that price might be worth paying. Although these premium uses make up only 8% of our delivered energy needs, we now supply 13% of our energy as electricity. Thus, five-thirteenths of the electricity we use is spilling over into uneconomic uses. It is providing low-temperature heating and cooling — needs which can be met much more cheaply with other forms of energy or (cheapest of all) with good architecture. Furthermore, if some of our power plants weren't sitting idle, unable to sell their output, we would supply 16% of our energy in electricity-twice the amount that could be used in a cost-effective fashion.
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