Measuring ‘Negawatts’ for Savings : Environment: They used to call the Colorado researchers gadflies. Now they are more like gurus as their methods save electricity the easy way.
A decade ago, “soft-energy” expert Amory Lovins felt like a gadfly in energy-industry circles.
Now, he’s more of a guru, visited at his mountain home here by a steady stream of utility executives seeking advice on how to make their customers’ kilowatts go further.
His clients include large and small utilities, government agencies and universities around the world.
Lovins, a physicist, and his lawyer wife, Hunter, run the Rocky Mountain Institute out of an energy-efficient building that serves as home and office. Arguing that new nuclear and traditional power plants are no longer economically feasible, they advocate “negawatts”--the amount of electricity saved through conservation--as cheaper than megawatts.
Amory Lovins believes, for example, that the United States can operate on one-quarter the energy it now uses without cutting back on services if it turns to available technologies such as higher efficiency motor drives and lighting systems.
Those changes, he said, could save $300 billion annually while reducing pollution, global warming and the federal deficit.
Consumer energy needs--what Amory Lovins calls “hot showers and cold beer”--would be cheaper because utilities’ costs would be lower, he said.
RMI’s 12-member staff’s emphasis on efficiency extends to water resources, economic development, agriculture and other disciplines.
Their ultimate aim, said Hunter Lovins, is to increase global security by reducing tensions over raw materials.
The Lovinses don’t call themselves environmentalists, since that might imply they reach their conclusions for other than economic reasons.
“It’s wasn’t the Clamshell Alliance that shut down nuclear power,” said Hunter Lovins, referring to an anti-nuclear environmental group. “It was the pinstripe alliance. Wall Street just said this is a silly place to put money.”
But sometimes RMI gets into environmental disputes that involve energy issues. In the proposed Two Forks Dam southwest of Denver, RMI showed that the Denver Water Board could save its customers as much water through an efficiency program as it could through Two Forks, at one-fifth the cost.
The Lovinses believe they helped influence Environmental Protection Agency chief William K. Reilly to say a couple weeks later that he likely would veto the dam.
Amory Lovins spends most of his time these days on just one of RMI’s programs: Competitek, which is aimed at helping utilities and other large energy users increase efficiency.
Competitek clients now number about 70, from the huge Tokyo Electric Power Co. to the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
The Wall Street Journal selected him as one of “the rising stars, the leaders of tomorrow,” in a special centennial issue last year.
According to Amory Lovins, it’s a far cry from the reception he got in the late 1970s with the publication of his book “Soft Energy Paths.” At a time when Americans were waiting in line for gasoline and worrying about dependence on foreign oil, Amory Lovins challenged traditional ways of looking at energy and national security.
He argued that national security was better won by turning to energy efficiency and renewable energy sources than by trying to ensure access to more oil reserves. He said nuclear plants eventually would be priced out of the market as too inefficient.
“Outraged. Derisive,” Amory Lovins said of the response from many energy insiders.
“But many of those same companies are now our clients. They just discovered that I was right the first time.”
Utility executives still differ with Amory Lovins on many key points, including the future of traditional and nuclear plants, but they are lending an ear to his talk about efficiency.
“We’re just exploring every avenue we can to make our customers more economical,” said Steve Strickland of Arkansas Power & Light Co. of Little Rock, which recently signed on as a Competitek client after Strickland and other executives visited RMI.
For $15,000, AP&L; gets information on new technologies from RMI, and some consulting time with Amory Lovins.
AP&L; has more than enough energy with its existing plants, Strickland said, but in a sense it is being forced to compete by proxy in an international arena.
While electric utilities are more competitive than ever, Strickland said, their industrial customers are in strong international competition with companies that have the benefit of cheaper labor. The edge for the American companies may well be cheaper energy.
“If we don’t have an efficient advantage to overcome cheaper labor rates in other countries, we’ll lose jobs.”
When Strickland and other AP&L; executives visited RMI, they sat around a wooden table with Amory Lovins in a building that is a virtual museum of energy-efficient gadgets.
The 4,000-square-foot building, which includes living space for a few people and office space for a couple dozen, has $50 monthly electric bills, half of which come from one office copying machine, the Lovinses say.
Solar-heated with 16-inch walls, the building is built into the north side of a hill to protect it from the elements. Insulation is two to three times that of a normal house.
Inside, the toilets use up to 90% less water than traditional ones and the faucets are adjustable. There are high-efficiency, compact fluorescent light bulbs, a refrigerator that can be adjusted to provide passive cooling in the winter and a greenhouse with garden vegetables, a banana tree and an insect-eating iguana.
The light-sensitive lamps leave things a bit dim at dusk, and Strickland said he felt cool in the big main room.
But the Lovinses insist that there is no need to freeze in the dark to increase efficiency.
Said Hunter Lovins: “What matters is if you’ve got to go out today and build a new plant or discover new oil, what that’s going to cost us? And how does that compare to going out today and building solar panels on your roof or adding attic insulation?”
The respective answers, according to the Lovinses, are “too much,” and “not well.”
