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One Man's Long Battle To Get U.S. to Kick Oil
But if Lovins has gone the corporate route to push his ideas, his living environment is very different. His 4,000-foot house-cum-office, perched at an altitude of 7,100 feet in a valley here in the Rocky Mountains, is a working model of what he sees as possible.
Though temperatures can drop to minus-47 degrees Fahrenheit and frost can form most of the year, the house runs on the amount of energy it takes to fuel one conventional light bulb, largely because of a good insulation and a central, sun-filled atrium, which is stocked year-round with tropical plants and fish. (Lovins says he's harvested 28 banana crops inside the atrium.) Some well-placed fans, vents and ducts circulate the air and distribute heat. Solar cells on the roof supplement the house's energy needs, which are modest, thanks to compact fluorescent light bulbs and energy-efficient appliances, so eerily quiet that Lovins installed a small waterfall fountain for a little background noise. (True, the house did seem a bit dimly lighted as his interview-lecture lasted longer than the daylight.)
  Amory Lovins, at his institute in Colorado, is known for his ambitious plans for using alternative energy sources. (David Marlow) |
He used to share the house with his wife, co-author and partner L. Hunter Lovins, but the two split up in 2002. His current partner is Judy Hill, a landscape photographer. His entryway is full of stuffed toy orangutans, though he has no children.
Less energy demand from houses like his is part of Lovins's push for a future with fewer big, capital-intensive power plants and more localized power-generating facilities. "The power sector is now a black hole for capital," he said.
There's a security dimension, too. More than 20 years ago he wrote an Atlantic Monthly article about how "microgeneration" would help make the United States less vulnerable to sabotage. Now, with the post-Sept. 11 obsession with terrorism, Lovins finds himself getting renewed interest from national security experts on the conservative end of the political spectrum. R. James Woolsey, a former CIA director long interested in Lovins's ideas, co-authored a piece with Lovins on security in 2002.
Lovins testified before Congress in March on energy independence. He says that the United States has saved three units of energy for every new one produced since the mid-1970s. "The most comprehensive threat to our national energy security is our current national energy policy," he says.
Unlike some environmentalists, Lovins remains adamantly opposed to nuclear power, which he says doesn't make economic or nonproliferation sense. New U.S. subsidies in last year's Energy Policy Act, he notes, "are equal to the entire capital cost of the next six reactors . . . but is similar to defibrillating a corpse: it will jump but not revive."
He opposes the accord before Congress that would enable U.S. companies to help India's civilian nuclear power sector. India, he says, was the world's third-largest installer of wind-power generation last year (after Germany and Spain). It would do better by promoting efficiency, he said, than by sinking money into nuclear plants, which will account for only 4 percent of the country's energy needs. "We're going to blow up what's left of the nonproliferation regimes to promote a sector that doesn't make sense," Lovins said.
Automobile efficiency is a key element in Lovins's vision for ending America's oil dependency. For years he promoted a light, aero-dynamic "Hypercar" that he helped design, which he said got more than 100 miles per gallon. Ultimately, he said, it would run on a fuel cell powered by tanks of compressed gaseous hydrogen fuel. General Motors Corp. talked to Lovins but ultimately did not adopt it. Some colleagues say Lovins was unrealistic about Detroit. His company, Hypercar Inc., has morphed into FiberForge, a private company that makes ultra-light composite products for bike helmets, skateboards and laptop cases.
The goal is still to alter the automobile industry by making parts for lighter, more fuel-efficient cars without sacrificing safety. The Rocky Mountain Institute owns a fifth of FiberForge.
After 30 years, Lovins can seem quixotic in his quest for new energy policies and practices. As Lovins concedes, good ideas often lie fallow.
"He'll say you can do this in six years and in theory you could -- if there were no such thing as reality," said a person who has worked with Lovins and spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve their relationship. "There are interests, and you need to net in half of what he says for starters, maybe. If you're a CEO, you'll bring him in, listen and wean out the ones you can do."
But maybe his time is arriving. Even the Pentagon has talked to him about ways to save fuel.
And then there's Cary Bullock, chief executive of GreenFuel Technologies Corp., which is researching technology that would use sunlight and algae to convert carbon dioxide byproducts at power plants or factories into usable transportation fuel. In 1976, Bullock was working at a company that specialized in optical character recognition. After reading the Lovins article in Foreign Affairs, Bullock quit and went into the energy business. "It was a visionary article," Bullock said. "Every now and then someone wanders into a field and starts talking and has a dramatic impact."
