Lovin' Energy Efficiency

Amory Lovins bursts with so many ideas that if you blink you miss ten of them. Speaking at Techonomy today, he outlined an agenda he called Reinventing Fire--nothing less than obliterating all oil and gas usage by 2050. “We do transformation, not incrementalism,” Lovins explained. Yeah.

You can read some of the details of Lovins’ agenda here, and much of the arguments from his talk can also be found in this CNN.com piece.The basic argument is that we can entirely slash oil usage first through increasing efficiency—particularly for vehicles--and then secondarily by replacing it with natural gas and biofuels.

Some of Lovins most striking ideas concern remaking our vehicle fleet.

He pointed out that two-thirds of the energy needed to move a car is caused by its weight—all that steel. So all you have to do is build lighter cars out of materials like carbon fiber composites, and you save massive amounts of fuel energy. It’s the equivalent, Lovins said, to “finding a Saudia Arabia under Detroit.”

What's more, Lovins doesn’t think you need government intervention to make these changes. He thinks the smart companies already get it—and the dumb companies will just be left behind. “Not all the fossils are in fuel,” Lovins said.

I’m not sure what to like more about Lovins—his ideas or his sense of humor.

Comments

[TahoeBlue]

If we divide energy use into two large camps, terrestrial and mobile (vehicular, not wireless ! ), then Lovins' objective to reduce oil and gas consumption by engineering more efficient, lighter-weight vehicles is certainly on target.

However, transportation itself is of several varieties: individual, freight, and aviation. We would be well advised to focus usage of hydrocarbon fuels for aviation -- planes can not fly on electricity -- they need the propulsion provided by burning hydrocarbons.

Individuals can be moved in urban areas by electrical or electrcally-supplemented vehicles, and rail transport is certainly amenable to be powered by terrestrial electricity. Transport of freight by trucking, however, will also need portable power, and natural gas -- which is relatively plentiful in the North American continent -- is a much better source than foreign oil.

But Lovins appears to miss the boat by not factoring in nuclear generation of terrestrial electricity as an efficient source of the increased demand on electrical power which will definitely accompany the move away from foreign oil.