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Soft Energy Technologies

DECENTRALISM FILE

Amory Lovins

Amory Bloch Lovins (1947 –   ) is an influential American writer, and energy activist.  He was in born in Washington DC and educated at Harvard and Magdalene College, Oxford.  He founded and remains as Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado.

He has written on energy policy and related subjects for four decades, In 1983, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for “pioneering soft energy paths for global security.”

His  writings include Reinventing Fire, Winning the Oil Endgame, Small is Profitable, Brittle Power, and Natural Capitalism. He first came to national attention in the U.S. with his article “Soft Energy Paths” in his article “Energy Strategy: The Path Not Taken (Foreign Affairs, October 1976) later expanded in a book Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (1977).

Lovins has promoted energy efficiency, the use of renewable energy sources, and the generation of energy at or near the site where the energy is actually used. He has also advocated a “negawatt revolution”, arguing that utility customers don’t want kilowatt-hours of electricity; they want energy services. Another Lovins theme is that large institutions are becoming more “gridlocked and moribund”, and he has criticized “ever more costly, complex, centralized and gigantic plants”. Chief among such were the nuclear power plants familiar to him in the 1970s, that also created what he saw as the certainty of nuclear proliferation. He favored intermediate technology, and energy generation scaled down to human communities and operated by and in those communities.

The excerpt below is from Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace. San Francisco, Friends of the Earth International (1977).

2.5. SOFT ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES

“There exists today a body of energy technologies that have certain specific features in common and that offer great technical, economic, and political attractions, yet for which there is no generic term. For lack of a more satisfactory term, I shall call them “soft” technologies: a textural description, intended to mean not vague, mushy, speculative, or ephemeral, but rather flexible, resilient, sustainable, and benign. Energy paths dependent on soft technologies, illustrated in Figure 2-2, will be called “soft” energy paths, as the “hard” technologies sketched in Chapter 2.2 constitute a “hard” path (in both senses). The distinction between hard and soft energy paths rests not on how much energy is used, but on the technical and sociopolitical structure of the energy system, thus focusing our attention on consequent and crucial political differences.

In Figure 2-2, then, the social structure is significantly shaped by the rapid deployment of soft technologies. These are defined by five characteristics:

  1. They rely on renewable energy flows that are always there whether we use them or not, such as sun and wind and vegetation: on energy income, not on depletable energy capital.
  2. They are diverse, so that as a national treasury runs on many small tax contributions, so national energy supply is an aggregate of very many individually modest contributions, each designed for maximum effectiveness in particular circumstances.
  3. They are flexible and relatively low technology—which does not mean unsophisticated, but rather, easy to understand and use without esoteric skills, accessible rather than arcane (see Chapter Nine).
  4. They are matched in scale and in geographic distribution to end use needs, taking advantage of the free distribution of most natural energy flows.
  5. They are matched in energy quality to end-use needs: a key feature that deserves immediate explanation.

People do not want electricity or oil, nor such economic abstractions as “residential services,” but rather comfortable rooms, light, vehicular motion, food, tables, and other real things. Such end-use needs can be classified by the physical nature of the task to be done (see Chapter Four). In the United States today, about 58 percent of all energy at the point of end use is required as heat, split roughly 23-35 between temperatures above and below the boiling point of water. (In Western Europe the low temperature heat alone is often a half of all end-use energy.) Another 38 percent of all U.S. end use energy provides mechanical motion: 31 percent in vehicles, 3 percent in pipelines, 4 percent in industrial electric motors. The rest, a mere 4 percent of delivered energy, represents all lighting, electronics, telecommunications, electrometallurgy, electrochemistry, arc welding, electric motors in home appliances and in railways, and similar end uses that now require electricity.

Some 8 percent of all U.S. energy end use, then, and similarly little abroad (see Chapter 4), requires electricity for purposes other than low temperature heating and cooling. Yet, since we actually use electricity for many such low grade purposes, it now meets 13 percent of U.S. end-use needs—and its generation consumes 29 percent of U.S. fossil fuels. A hard energy path would increase this 13 percent figure to 20-40 percent (depending on assumptions) by the year 2000, and far more thereafter. But this is wasteful because the laws of physics require, broadly speaking, that a power station change three units of fuel into two units of almost useless waste heat plus one unit of electricity. This electricity can do more difficult kinds of work than can the original fuel, but unless this extra quality and versatility are used to advantage, the costly process of upgrading the fuel and losing two-thirds of it—is all for naught.

Plainly we are using premium fuels and electricity for many tasks for which their high energy quality is superfluous, wasteful, and expensive, and a hard path would make this inelegant practice even more common. Where we want only to create temperature differences of tens of degrees, we should meet the need with sources whose potential is tens or hundreds of degrees, not with a flame temperature of thousands or a nuclear reaction temperature equivalent to trillions—like cutting butter with a chainsaw.

For some applications, electricity is appropriate and indispensable: electronics, smelting, subways, most lighting, some kinds of mechanical work, and a few more. But these uses are already oversupplied, and for the other, dominant, uses remaining in our energy economy this special form of energy cannot give us our money’s worth (in many parts of the United States today it already costs $50-120 per barrel equivalent). Indeed, in probably no industrial country today can additional supplies of electricity be used to thermodynamic advantage that would justify their high cost in money and fuels.

So limited are the U.S. end uses that really require electricity that by applying careful technical fixes to them we could reduce their 8 percent total to about 5 percent (mainly by reducing commercial overlighting), whereupon we could probably cover all those needs with present U.S. hydroelectric capacity plus the cogeneration capacity available in the mid to late 1980s. Thus an affluent industrial economy could advantageously operate with no central power stations at all! In practice we would not necessarily want to go that far, at least not for a long time; but the possibility illustrates how far we are from supplying energy only in the quality needed for the task at hand.

Just as soft technologies’ matching of energy quality to end-use needs virtually eliminates the costs and losses of secondary energy conversion, so the appropriate scale (see Chapter Five) of soft technologies can virtually eliminate the costs and losses of energy distribution.(Matching scale to end uses can indeed achieve at least five important types of economies (see Chapter Five) not available to larger, more centralized systems. The first type is reduced and shared overheads) At least half your electricity bill is fixed distribution costs to pay the overheads of a sprawling energy system: transmission lines, transformers, cables, meters and people to read them, planners, headquarters, billing computers, interoffice memos, advertising agencies. For electrical and some fossil fuel systems, distribution accounts for more than half of total capital cost, and administration for a significant fraction of total operating cost. Local or domestic energy systems can reduce or even eliminate these infrastructure costs. The resulting savings can far outweigh the extra costs of the dispersed maintenance infrastructure that the small systems require, particularly where that infrastructure already exists or can be shared (e.g., plumbers fixing solar heaters as well as sinks).

Small scale brings further savings by virtually eliminating distribution losses which are cumulative and pervasive in centralized energy systems (particularly those using high quality energy). Small systems also avoid direct diseconomies of scale, such as the frequent unreliability of large units and the related need to provide instant “spinning reserve” capacity on electrical grids to replace large stations that suddenly fail.  Small systems with short, lead times greatly reduce exposure to interest escalation, and mistimed demand forecasts— major indirect diseconomies of large scale

The fifth type of economy available to small systems arises from mass production. Consider, as Henrik Harboe suggests, the 100-odd million cars in the U.S. In round numbers, each car probably has an average cost of less than $4000 and a shaft power over 100 kilowatts (134 horsepower). Presumably a good engineer could build a generator and upgrade an automobile engine to a reliable, 35 percent efficient diesel at no greater total cost, yielding a mass-produced diesel generator unit costing less than $40 per kW. In contrast, the motive capacity in U.S. central power stations—currently totaling about one-fortieth as much as in U.S. cars—costs perhaps ten times more per kW, partly because it is not mass produced. This is not to argue for the widespread use of diesel generators; rather, to suggest that if we could build power stations the way we build cars, they would cost at least ten times less than they do, but we can’t because they’re too big. In view of this scope for mass-producing small systems, it is not surprising that at least one European car maker hopes to go into the wind machine and heat pump business. Such a market can be entered incrementally, without the billions of dollars’ investment required for, say, liquefying natural gas or gasifying coal. It may require a production philosophy oriented toward technical simplicity, low replacement cost, slow-obsolescence, high reliability, high volume, and low markup; but these are familiar concepts in mass production. Industrial resistance would presumably melt when—as with pollution abatement equipment—the scope for profit was perceived.

This is not to say that all energy systems need be at domestic scale. The object is to crack nuts with nutcrackers and drive pilings with triphammers, not the reverse: to use the most appropriately scaled tool for the job and so minimize costs, including social costs. In some cases this will require big systems, chiefly the existing hydroelectric dams. In most cases the scale needed will be smaller. For example, the medium scale of urban neighborhoods and rural villages offers fine prospects for solar collectors—especially for adding collectors to existing buildings of which some (perhaps with large flat roofs) can take excess collector area while others cannot take any. They could be joined via communal heat storage systems, saving on labor costs and on heat losses. The costly craftwork of remodeling existing systems—”backfitting” or “retrofitting” idiosyncratic houses with individual collectors—could thereby be greatly reduced. Despite these advantages, medium-scale solar technologies are currently receiving little attention apart from a condominium village project in Vermont sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the one hundred dwelling unit Mejannes-le-Clap project in France.”

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