New study pushes for energy efficiency
American physicist Amory Lovins has published some of the most important findings for climate change since Lord Nicholas Stern published “The Economics of Climate Change” in 2007.
Current climate change discourse argues that globally, energy use has to be at least 3% more productively annually in order to stay below 2 degrees. Amory Lovins contradicts that the world’s ability to sustain such rapid savings (slightly above the 2015 peak of 2.8% per year) is far greater – and can prove even more profitable – than had been thought.
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In his paper, “How Big Is the Energy Efficiency Resource?”, Lovins shows that the potential for energy efficiency has been massively understated and its cost overstated, by analyzing not whole buildings, vehicles, and factories, but only their individual parts, thus missing valuable ways to help the parts work together to save more energy at lower cost. Lovins shows a pathway to staying well below 2 degrees is more achievable that any current climate scenarios assume or suggest.
“In the same way that no one expected the cost of solar and wind to plummet, driving faster adoption that cuts their cost further,” said Lovins.
“We have overlooked the ability of modern energy efficiency to do the same thing.”
The paper cites strong empirical evidence that the scope for energy efficiency is actually significantly larger and cheaper than had previously been thought. Unlike renewable energy, with its dipping costs, energy efficiency had been assumed to cost more as the cheapest methods are currently running out. This widespread assumption, based on economic theory and not engineering practice, was overturned by the editorial published peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters.
Documenting examples from buildings, vehicles, and industry, the report shows that several times more energy can be saved, often at much lower cost, than climate models assume, governments assess and reward, or industry expects and adopts. To achieve the full potential for saving energy, emissions, and money, the paper highlights the importance of “integrative design” as a key to unlocking unprecedented energy efficiency gains.
“Integrative design makes bigger savings cost less because it doesn’t add stuff; it leaves stuff out,” Lovins explained. “It designs energy-using systems not as isolated components but as a whole, so the parts work together to create bigger savings than the sum of the parts.”
Lovins also goes on to state that energy savings (about two-thirds from technologies) is currently doing three times more each year than renewables do.
“Both are vital; both reinforce each other; but It is the sum of both parts that matters for climate. Renewables, however, get nearly all the headlines, because unused energy is invisible,” said Lovins.