If you think or write about alternative energy now, there is no doubt that you’ve got some Amory Lovins in your DNA. He’s like the Genghis Khan of the alt energy tribe; almost every one of us is sort of a descendent. Hell, he even got made into a comic book character (above) in the short-lived Energy Comics, a story described by its publisher Leonard Rifas in a 2007 paper.

Lovins is the kind of guy people love or hate. At 30, he became perhaps the most influential energy analyst in American history. Of course, when someone gets so spectacularly popular and powerful, their actual words tend to become obscured by what people think of them. They become a very convenient container for a packet of ideas that they may or may not actually hold. And that’s a very sad thing in Amory Lovins’ case because he’s a really fantastic writer and rhetorician.

That’s why it seems a goodly thing to blog my re-reading of his classic 1977 book, Soft Energy Paths. I have the feeling that many Lovins-haters will find themselves agreeing with him if they read his words. Nominal Lovins fans may find the opposite, too.

Three interesting backstory notes about this book before I begin the reading.

• It was published at a time when nuclear power had not ground to a halt in the United States and there was a very real possibility that breeder reactors — those that produce more fissionable material than goes into them — were going to form the backbone of the American energy system. This “plutonium economy” is the real target of the book. It is the hard path.
• The science of climate change was just beginning its long scientific slog towards gradual acceptance. Cutting down carbon dioxide is not part of Lovins’ central arguments.
• The meat of the book — and a famous Foreign Policy paper on which its based — were actually commissioned by Alvin Weinberg. He’s best known as the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and perhaps the greatest believer in nuclear power that ever was. In his 1994 memoir, he recalls that he and Lovins “become good friends, although in my reviews of Amory’s many books, I often attacked him for being so wrong-headed.” He also tells a quick anecdote about Lovins’ influence on American energy policy. The National Research Council ran a $4 million study (CONAES) in the early 1980s of American energy policy. When Weinberg asked the study’s leader who had more influence on U.S. energy policy, the director replied, “Amory, of course.”

The first time I read this book back a couple of years ago, I was mostly skimming it for old projects that I could add to my book. I wasn’t trying to really grapple with his arguments and I didn’t have the contextual knowledge I would have needed, anyway.

I should also say before we begin that I have a complex relationship with Lovins. I love his optimism, what Barbara Ward calls in the foreword, “the great merit” of his work: “he can convince both the citizen and the scientist that, beyond the great energy outburst, survival is not only possible: it may well be more safe and agreeable as well.” But I’m also prone to pessimism like energy researcher Vaclav Smil. Lovins thinks too much can be done too easily. The gains that can be made are more tightly circumscribed by history and habit than Lovins would have you believe. Smil:

My attitude to Lovins’s sermons has not changed during the past 25 years: I have always wholeheartedly agreed with many of his conclusions and ideas and parts of his and my writings, although informed by very different backgrounds are interchangeable. I share his quest for technical rationality, higher conversion efficiencies and reduced environmental impacts. I agree with many of his goals—but not with any of his excessive claims and recurrent exaggerations.

That’s much harsher than my own view of Lovins’ work. It seems to me that he defines the envelope of possibility while Smil sketches more probable but limited paths. Sometimes I feel like the two of them sit on my shoulders whispering in my ears as I work on my book. But neither of them is a devil or an angel, and they both can be useful and wise.

Ok, enough hemming and hawing. The reading will begin shortly. (Because some sections move through different ideas and writing transitions is hard, I’m going to put a little * when I’m changing tack to talk about something else in the book. That way you can also skip down if you’re reading it in pieces.)

*

Page 1. The very first line of the book, the heading of the first section is brilliant: TECHNOLOGY IS THE ANSWER! (BUT WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?). It sets up Lovins’ whole project, which he then quickly defines in opposition to the mainstream view: “The energy problem, according to conventional wisdom, is how to increase energy supplies (especially domestic supplies) to meet projected demands. As population in most industrial countries rises by less than a fifth over the next few decades, we are told that our use of energy must double and our use of electricity treble. Not fulfilling such prophecies, it is claimed, would mean massive unemployment, economic depression, and freezing in the dark.”

This is actually a pretty good statement of affairs. Those levels of energy use increases were, in fact, what analysts and utility executives were projecting with all the smug confidence that comes with a couple of decades of data behind them. It was nearly inconceivable that the situation could change. The U.S. uses about 100 quads of energy a year now. Most predictions from the 70s were more in the 160-190 quad range. (To get an idea for how amazing those projections were, imagine having two power plants for every one we currently have. And two cars for every one on the road, probably, too. And twice as many houses. We may think we live in a sprawled out, McMansion and SUV-loving profligate world, but that’s nothing compared to what those “in the know” were projecting.)

Looking at all these graphs and spreadsheets, Lovins asks, “But where do these ‘projected needs’ come from?” Then he provides a long “pungent” quote from Herman Daly:

Recent growth rates of population and per capita energy use are projected up to some arbitrary, round-numbered date. Whatever technologies are required to produce the projected amount are automatically accepted, along with their social implications, and no thought is given to how long the system can last once the projected levels are attained. Trend is, in effect, elevated to destiny, and history either stops or starts afresh on the bi-millennial year, or the year 2050 or whatever. This approach is unworthy of any organism with a central nervous system, much less a cerebral cortex.

*

Lovins next move is to show that the ability to build the systems to fit these linear projections is “rapidly grinding to a halt.” It was, he said:

• “politically unworkable” because of environmental concerns associated with the extraction of resources and subsequent energy production and use. People who “directly perceive the prohibitive social and environmental costs” of the system greet “these enterprises with a comprehensive lack of enthusiasm.”
• “technically unworkable” because “there is mounting evidence that even the richest and most sophisticated countries lack the skills, industrial capacity and managerial ability to sustain such a rapid expansion.”
• “economically unworkable” because “such free market mechanisms as still operate have persistently shown themselves unwilling to allocate to the extremely capital-intensive, high-risk supply technologies the money needed to build them.”

What’s interesting is that all three of these points are still furiously contested, particularly around nuclear power plants. I’d argue that the technical and economic arguments are stronger right now, as political opposition to many energy technologies comes not from those closest to the environmental costs, but those farthest away. It’s not the Gulf Coast that’s clamoring to stop drilling or even the people closest to nuclear plants that want to stop them from going in.

If you’ve been following the debate on loan guarantees for nuclear power plants, you know that the economic viability of the stations are still in doubt, but really, no one is quite sure how much it will cost to build a new plant in the U.S. or how long it will take. The variations in estimates are themselves even a cause for concern.

Then, here’s a characteristic Lovins reframing that’s just beautiful:

The basic tenet of high-energy projections is that the more enrgy we use, the better off we are. But how much energy we use to accomplish our social goals could instead be considered a measure less of our success than of our failure—just as the amount of traffic we must endure to get where we want to go is a measure not of well-being but rather of our failure to establish a rational settlement pattern.

It’s deceptively simple, but really, this is taking on the entire literature of the power industry from 1900 to, well, now. What was called the “grow-and-build” strategy was the official policy of most utilities, as brilliantly and sympathetically explored by historian Richard Hirsh in his book Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry. In 1944, the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority held that “the quantity of electrical energy in the hands of people is a modern measure of the people’s command over their resources and the single best measure of their productiveness, their opportunities for industrialization, their potentialities for the future.”

Access to power really is important, and even in 1937, a National Resources Committee, still found it relevant to measure the “power available” to Americans. For most of the country’s history, people had just a couple of horsepower available to them to do work. Now, the power available to them was essentially unlimited.

Engineers thought they were doing some good! They “saw themselves,” this is Hirsh again, “as stewards of technological and social progress who enhanced the public’s welfare.” The National Academy of Engineering voted The Grid as the number one engineering achievement of the 20th century. And for decades, utility executives were able to build bigger and bigger plants while pushing down the kilowatt hour cost for consumers. The way they saw it, their work helped defeat the Nazis and provided the industrial arsenal that held the Soviet menace at bay.

Then here comes this Lovins guy telling them that the amount of power they produce isn’t a measure of their success but of their failure! It is not entirely surprising that he was received with hostility and sometimes downright hatred.

*

Lovins surveys the energy landscape in the post oil embargo world of the mid-70s. What’s happened he says, is that “energy, for so long treated as a free good, can no longer be taken for granted, but will become much more expensive no matter what we do. It must now be economized, much as we have economized on costly labor in the recent past. OPEC oil is a bargain, and except for possibly short-term fluctuations we shall not have large amounts of energy so cheaply again.”

We’ll talk about that statement in a second, but here Lovins slips a second paragraph under the first, pointing out “serious structural problems” in the industrial nations: “centrism, vulnerability, technocracy, repression, alienation, and the stresses and conflicts they bring.” Those “social and political problems” seemed to Lovins “a sufficient reason to seek new approaches to the energy problem.”

Then we get to his famous two paths: “This book is devoted to a comparison of two energy paths that are distinguished ultimately by their antithetical social implications.” And for those that argue that the cold, invisible hand of economics will steer people away from the preferred social path, Lovins responds, “surprisingly, a heroic decision does not seem necessary in this case, because the energy system that seems socially more attractive is also cheaper and easier.”

There’s a lot going on beneath Lovins’ smooth prose. Two different reasons are posited for changing the energy system, and they become entangled in a way that may ultimately by fallacious.

The first reason is hard and inevitable, the “inexorable laws of nature” of declining resource extraction catching up with us. The end of cheap energy had reached its end, Lovins argued. But then it turned out it hadn’t, actually. In 1999, I was driving a Ford Escort ZX2 and paying $0.99 per gallon at the Circle K off Exit 14 on I-5 in Washington State. Everyone forgot about “the end of cheap energy” because they were pumping it into their SUVs.

With oil that cheap and coal prices low, the socially attractive energy scheme he liked wasn’t cheaper and was only debatably easier.

Generally, I’m run into this a lot with the 70s deep energy thinkers. They used rising energy prices as a Trojan horse for all sorts of social and political arguments. Lovins links energy to “centrism, vulnerability, technocracy, repression, alienation” but he leads with the end of cheap energy. It’s stronger to rest on inevitability than political will, I suppose, but when that inevitability turns out to be false, the argument crumbles.

This is something that Lovins might have known from his work deconstructing utility projections. The same types of forecasting errors — or really, just forecasts because they are all wrong — led many environmentalists, Lovins included, to conclude that the era of “cataclysmic wealth” was over. The firmness of their conviction and miss on that score continues to haunt anyone who wants to talk about resource scarcity now. Maybe high oil prices and gas lines were necessary to create a popular movement for energy system change, but in playing the inevitability card, 70s alt energy advocates hurt their chances at being taken seriously 30 years later when similar problems are creeping up on us. The world surprises us and we should take that into consideration when arguing that something must happen. Unfortunately, energy arguments work exactly the opposite way. We might as well begin fights over nuclear power or oil or coal by saying, “May the most inevitable inevitability win.”

In any case, Lovins had a lot going for his social and political arguments without the price of energy stuff. He appealed to mainstream political and social values like democraticization and self-reliance, themes which have resonated with the people of this country down through the centuries. Lovins exposed that lurking within the carefully crafted projections of 7% growth in electricity per year, there was a social argument, an argument about the way America should be. When he rendered the visions of the technocratic utility executives in plain English, and asked his fellow citizens, “Is this what you want?” many of them answered, “Hell no!”

This is just a hypothesis, but it seems to me that any political or social movement to change the way we make and use energy will have to be robust to energy price movements. It will have to be embedded in a firm social sense of where we want the country to go and the development of infrastructure, institutions, laws, and technologies that get us there. I was inspired last night by this grassroots Los Angeles bike lane plan. What I love about it is how tactical the blog post’s author is about what victory will take. He knows that to get a certain amount of pavement marked off for bikers, it’s going to take old-school politics and lobbying over years — and he’s willing to do it because if he wins, his life is enhanced by the infrastructure that he created. This is, to steal a line from The Breakthrough Institute, “the politics of possibility.” Last night, without thinking about it much, I tweeted, “Infrastructural possibility can create political will.” And in the light of morning, I’m excited by that idea anew: build movements around concrete things, like actual concrete formed from cement and gravel, not just firm conviction.

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Lovins popularized the idea of matching the needs of the end use (say, space heating) with the type of energy input. While in the 19th century, different fuels and machines were used heat, light, and power, the arrival of electricity — sometimes called the “universal power” — began to obscure those differences. Lovins and his ilk brought back the idea with a vengeance. “How much primary energy we use—the fuel we take out of the ground—does not tell us how much energy is delivered at the point of end use (the device that does the kind of work we desire), for that depends on how efficient our energy supply system is.”

This allows Lovins to unlink primary energy use with “well-being.” That’s an incredibly important move, and one that distinguishes him from a lot of other energy people.

It also lets him concentrate on “the conversion and distribution losses that rob us of much delivered end-use energy.” Because so much is lost in conversion and distribution from large facilities, this analysis argues for decentralization of power plants.

It’s true that even the best coal plants, say, only convert 40% of the heat value of the coal they burn into electricity, subtract a few more percent for transmission long-distances and local distribution, and you can see his point. We generate a lot more heat than we get out electricity.

But I’ve always had the intuition that perhaps Lovins’ analysis — and the many identical arguments made down through the years — lets small end-users off the hook while holding the quantifiable large power plants accountable. Again, looking back to the early 20th century, when many people ran their own coal boilers in places like Chicago and Pittsburgh, it was very difficult to get all of them to keep their boilers running efficiently. If they didn’t, the boilers belched out smoke, which called an entire environmental movement into being to fight “the smoke nuisance.”

So not only do you need to get people matching up their energy inputs with their end-uses but you have to bank on them creating efficient systems. You know, we have a system that works like that now: cars. While power plant efficiencies have gone up, fuel efficiency — driven partially by lack of regulation and partially by consumer choices — has been pretty flat since the early 90s.

I’m not saying that’s right, but I am saying that pushing the responsibility for technical efficiency down to rank-and-file consumers may not yield the results that Lovins is after. That type of rationality is not always or even generally a part of consumer behavior.

*

Lovins lists his “worldview” in 12 easy to follow points. Perhaps the most interesting bit is his succinct statement: “the energy problem should not be how to expand supplies to meet the postulated extrapolative needs of a dynamic economy, but rather how to accomplish social goals elegantly with a minimum of energy and effort, meanwhile taking care to preserve the social fabric that not only tolerates but encourages diverse values and lifestyles.”

*

The specter of the nuclear future looms in section 1.4 of the book. “Thus nuclear power, as Walter Patterson puts it, is not a yes-no question, but an either-or question: Do we have it, or do we instead have the other systems with which it competes for our resources?” With the benefit of hindsight, it’s interesting to see that we have neither the hard or soft path. Nuclear power was staggered but softer technologies didn’t replace its proposed contribution; industrial efficiency, coal, natural gas, and oil did. There are a lot of reasons for that (that’s what my book’s about ultimately) but for now, let’s just treat that as a fact. The choice turned out to be neither/nor.

We can also see now that having nuclear power plants running for decades hasn’t destroyed American liberty or anything. It’s hard to even say they are the riskiest power plants operating right now, given the issues with coal.

*

The concrete proposal that gets the most attention in the introduction is the introduction of a Federal fuel tax, which would let us “smoothly anticipate the inevitable price rise rather than having to swallow it all at once later when we are less well prepared for it.” He argues that this is basically a “depletion allowance backwards,” in reference to the tax break given to oil companies for pumping oil. This tax, recently resuggested in various forms, “would work through the economy and be reflected automatically in the price of goods and services in proportion to their direct and indirect energy content.”

Note that this is basically the idea behind a carbon tax, too, but because climate change wasn’t a frontline issue, Lovins goes straight to the heart o the matter: let’s tax fuel use, straight up. The only difference with a carbon tax is that it would provide less disincentives for burning cleaner fuels.

*

Lovins has an interesting quarrel on the evaluation of different types of technologies.

“Technologies that are complex, glamorous, and backed by powerful constituencies are given lavish subsidies, subventions, bailouts, and exemptions from paying their own environmental and social costs, while technologies that are simple mundane and less endowed with wealthy lobbyists are subjects to a far more rigorous set of economic tests and requirements.”

His language here implies that this is obviously nuts and due only to political hackery. But there is a reason that high-tech alternatives are attractive: hope! Early-stage technologies improve in a variety of ways, so it may make sense to throw money at complex technologies like photovoltaics because they could get a lot better faster, eventually opening up new pathways to clean, cheap energy. Well-known technologies using well-known materials cost what they cost. Is it a good idea to deploy them? Sure, if there are economic or environmental reasons, but you can’t expect to get a lot more out of your investment than you put in. There’s no speculative play in the deal.

Take Exxon’s foray into alt energy in the 1970s, the Solar Power Corporation. Along with other researchers, they drove the price of photovoltaics from $100 per watt to about $10 per watt. In so doing, they brought the cost of solar down enough to find an actual marketplace in far-flung locations like oil rigs. It may not have been a large market, but it was big enough to keep companies interested in competing and developing the technologies further. In fact, the cost savings that came in the years following the big cost reductions of the first half the of the 1970s proved to be of a different kind than what Burman was able to do so quickly.

University of California Berkeley energy researcher Gregory Nemet found that the two largest factors in cost cutting between 1975 and 2001 were increases in the efficiency of modules in converting sunlight into electricity and capturing the economies of scale that come with building bigger plants. While scientific research may have continued to improve efficiencies without a market for photovoltaics, the scaling effects were made possible by the deep price drops brought about by the Solar Power Corporation and a select few other companies.

This is the promise of technological development. Advances lead to price drops, which encourage scaling and more research, which leads to more price drops, and so on and so forth.

*

What Lovins is best at is highlighting what supposed “realists” views actually mean over the long-term. He is excellent at poking holes in status quo thinking. For example, on page 22, he nails it:

“Critics who say a soft energy path is unacceptable because it must change lifestyles are implying that they themselves favor no change in lifestyle even over fifty years. This implies a static, zero growth economy with no technical or social progress—presumably not what they have in mind,” he writes. “What they probably mean is that they desire no change in certain highly selective patterns and rates of change in lifestyle that they consider agreeable for themselves and appropriate for other people. That is a very different matter.”

See how he turns a seemingly plain-sounding, dull, bureaucratic response — “we can’t change people’s lifestyles” — into an explication of what that means. Of course governments and politics shapes people’s lifestyles! And if we can do that, let’s shape them for the environmental good and not for the bad.

*

In the conclusion to his introduction, Lovins shows his incredible optimism. His “soft path offers advantages for every constituency,” he argues.

a soft path simultaneously offers jobs for the unemployed, capital for businesspeople, environmental protection for conservationists, enhanced national security for the military, opportunities for small businesses to innovate and for big business to recycle itself, exciting technologies for the secular, a rebirth of spiritual values for the religious, traditional virtues for the old, radical reforms for the young, world order and equity for globalists, energy independence for isolationists, civil rights for liberals, states’ rights for conservatives.

Whew. Who could possibly oppose such a plan? There was something for everyone! At a time when the nation was scrambling for an identity, that must have been some kind of promise. Here was salvation and unity of purpose. Unfortunately, the plan also seems like one in which support is a mile wide and an inch deep. Sure, there’s something for everyone, but not much for anyone except those who wanted a radical overhaul of the energy system and the end of nuclear power. For them, it was a jackpot.

*

In chapter two of the book — page 25, if you’re following along at home — Lovins unleashes what his plan is.

“The second path combines a prompt and serious commitment to efficient use of energy, rapid development of renewable energy sources matched in scale and in energy to end use needs, and special transitional fossil fuel technologies… It does not try to wipe the slate clean, but rather to redirect our future efforts, taking advantage of the big energy systems we already have without multiplying them further.”

This sounds a lot like what green technologists are saying now, right? It’s realistic and smart. But wait, there is something that people don’t talk a lot about now: “matched in scale and in energy to end use needs.” We’ll get to talk more about this in the following pages, but Lovins’ was not sold on electrification. He calculated on page 39 that we only need “high-quality” electricity for 8 percent of end-use tasks. The continued rise of electronics has probably shifted that number upwards a bit. (Note to self/commenters: what is that number now?)

Lovins’ emphasis on de-electrification is not widely shared by most green technologists these days. I think we’ll see why in the following pages.

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“Section 2.2: Hard Energy Paths” is one of Lovins’ most impressive. Here is where his ability to render the corporatespeak into plain reality becomes clear. He ticks off what would be necessary to satisfy the sky-high projections of demand just through 1985: 900 new oil wells, 170 new coal mines, 180 new coal plants, 140 new nuclear plants, 350 gas turbines… Then to get to the year 2000 the number get even larger: 450-800 nuclear reactors, 1000 to 1600 new coal mines, 15 million electric automobiles, etc.

It’s astounding and as he describes in 2.3, the energy industry alone would have required almost 75% of all the “net private domestic investment” from 1976 to 1985.

His basic point is that building all of that stuff just would have been too expensive and that spending all of their money on expensive reactors would bankrupt the utilities. In fact, this almost did come true with several floating the idea of a Federal bailout in 1984, largely because of cost overruns at nuclear power plants.

He ends the section on an ominous note: “thus some [utilities] must now tell their customers that the current dollar cost of a kilowatt-hour will treble by 1985, and that two-thirds of that increase will be capital charges for new plants.”

But what’s interesting is that while electricity prices did rise, they peaked in 1982 and 1983 and remain about at their late 70s levels. Lovins might point out this partially because nuclear plant building stopped in the mid-1980s. But capacity factors at nuclear plants also improved mightily — that means that the plants run much more often than they used to. The Nuclear Energy Institute gloats, “The average capacity factor for U.S. plants in operation in 1980 was 56.3 percent; in 1990, 66 percent; and in 2008, 91.5 percent.” The more often a plant can run generally speaking, the cheaper the unit cost of the power it produces.