In summer season 2023, we launched #AskAmory to gather your questions for RMI’s co-founder Amory Lovins, a world-renowned professional on power effectivity and renewables. Right here, we hold a operating listing of your questions and Amory’s solutions. Submit new questions right here and hold an eye fixed out for the solutions shared right here at rmi.org and on our social media handles.
Q1: How discouraged are you with the shortage of progress in getting off of fossil fuels? (Peggy H.)
ABL: I’m not. We’d like braveness, not dis-courage, and you’ll’t depress folks into motion. There’s rather a lot to be en-couraged about. The Worldwide Vitality Company’s new faster-efficiency settlement combines with renewables having taken 90+ % of the marketplace for web new electrical producing capability worldwide, and being the most affordable supply of bulk energy in nations with 82 % of world electrical energy use. US, EU, and Chinese language insurance policies are actually very supportive. The transition we outlined in Reinventing Fireplace is properly on observe and accelerating.
RMI strategist Kingsmill Bond properly explains its dynamics, and the way peaking works, in his “Peaking Collection.” Putin’s Conflict has blown up the foundations of the fossil-fuel period that underlies his energy (see the essay we co-wrote with three colleagues on “From Deep Disaster, Profound Change”). Maintain pushing with relentless persistence. We’ll get there.
Q2: Are we on the cusp of boring “deep sufficient, low cost sufficient” — nearly anyplace on Earth — to allow a Deep Scorching Dry Rock Geothermal (DHDRG) international power system? Ought to we cease losing time, expertise, and capital on constructing expensive new electrical energy transmission and storage property, to as an alternative speed up RD&D for, and proliferation of, 1000’s of DHDRG vegetation, the final word in DER? (Invoice L.)
ABL: No. We will’t wait — although to keep away from overbuying grid and storage property, they need to be competed or in contrast with effectivity and renewables, and people with one another. Very fast scaling of established and extremely aggressive effectivity and renewable capability mustn’t be delayed whereas researching much less mature choices. Invoice might know one thing I don’t about deep geothermal know-how, and far geothermal drilling does price about twice as a lot as best-practice hydrocarbon drilling, however I believe deep geothermal’s primary economics appears much less thrilling than it might have to.
Until one thing basic I missed has modified since my 2020 abstract, I believe its encouraging technical progress nonetheless doesn’t present a transparent case for beating the present market leaders — effectivity, photo voltaic, and wind. Geothermal hopes to make 5¢ energy in a number of many years, however on this decade, unsubsidized renewables are falling from 2¢–3¢ to 1¢/kWh. Neither is there an operational want or a enterprise case for “baseload, agency, dispatchable energy.” So I’d encourage extra RD&D on Invoice’s possibility, however not maintain my breath in regards to the consequence — and thankfully, we’ve got wonderful and ample choices with out it.
Q3: How will built-in design and 10xe engineering have an effect on the trail of the Nice Disruption forecast by RethinkX? Will it speed up change? (Gary S.)
ABL: Integrative design might certainly pace that disruption, to nice benefit, if it’s shortly acknowledged and unfold. Environment friendly power use was half of historic and will probably be no less than half of future international decarbonization. Thus, integrative design’s means to make the entire effectivity useful resource severalfold larger than generally thought — but cheaper — is an excellent alternative to assist renewables displace fossil fuels even sooner. My Stanford lessons on this topic have recognized ~20 scaling vectors I hope to check and unfold, so integrative design’s potential to quintuple international power effectivity by ~2060 can develop into a immediate actuality.
This autumn: Should you had $1 billion at your disposal and wished a most discount within the carbon footprint of 700,000 + folks within the Northern Nevada, Northern Sierra area comprised of the communities of Reno, Sparks, Carson Metropolis, Gardnerville, Incline Village, Pyramid Lake, Fernley, Yerington, and Fallon how would you spend the cash? (Jon W.)
ABL: I’d first make you the top of Nevada power coverage, then recommend you spend a lot of the $1B competitively procuring and debottlenecking environment friendly and well timed use of power (particularly electrical energy), and of energy-intensive supplies, in all sectors — together with constructing the human capability wanted in constructing trades and different implementing teams, and shifting swiftly to electrical mobility. I’d additionally pace decoupling-and-shared-savings for Nevada’s electrical energy (already executed for fuel) and bust limitations to deploying effectivity, demand response, and renewables.
Q5: What’s your imaginative and prescient for serving to shoppers within the power transition? Will VP3 [RMI’s Virtual Power Plant Partnership] and Vitality Internet assist shoppers? (Deedstack consumer on Twitter)
ABL: Use strategies like on-bill financing to fund deep constructing retrofits for all, so the family wants no capital funding. Use revenue- and size-neutral feebates to finance superefficient and electrical automobiles. Take into account the various different progressive solutions in RMI’s Reinventing Fireplace (1999).
Final 12 months’s warmth wave in California confirmed simply how essential buyer participation in demand response is to make sure dependable power service by the transition. Digital Energy Crops (VPPs) allow this sort of buyer participation at scale and supply direct affordability and buyer empowerment advantages. Via VPPs, clients enroll their house electrical gadgets to be aggregated collectively and coordinated with grid operations, offering the identical providers to the ability system as conventional energy vegetation. Properties and companies that take part in VPPs obtain direct compensation, and people that don’t nonetheless expertise decrease payments ensuing from deferred transmission, distribution, and era capability investments that sometimes get handed on to clients. RMI is working with main companies in VPP-related sectors by the Digital Energy Plant Partnership (VP3) to catalyze and scale the marketplace for VPPs.
Q6: We work with small indigenous Communities in Ontario, Canada. 🇨🇦 Within the face of over-regulation and lack of capability, what are the perfect instruments and practices to get to web zero? (Ketan B.)
ABL: Reinventing Fireplace continues to be our greatest overview of the large image. I recommend you test with my Stanford colleague Dr. Holmes Hummel to see if the strategies she’s helped small rural electrical co-ops to develop could be adaptable in your difficult setting. The economics of straightforward effectivity features must be compelling. In case your space is something just like the small Alaskan villages I labored with many years in the past, fashionable renewables must be too.
Q7: Pourquoi l’Afrique traine tant dans l’utilisation et le développement des véhicules électriques? Nous sommes à la recherche de bailleurs de fonds pour réaliser un projet d’unités de montage des motos, tricycles électriques au Mali et en Afrique de l’Ouest.
Translation:
Good morning. Why is Africa lagging a lot within the use and growth of electrical automobiles? We’re in search of donors to hold out a mission for meeting items of bikes and electrical tricycles in Mali and West Africa. (Amara D.)
ABL: I’m not conversant in your area’s particular circumstances, however think about they could resemble these which are driving enormous progress in two- and three-wheeled e-vehicles in rural and concrete China and India: greater than 300 million such automobiles are actually on the street globally, and so they’re half of China’s enormous EV progress. About 42% of 2022 two- and three-wheeler gross sales have been electrical, heading for 80% in one other decade or two, and so they’re already saving a million barrels of oil per day — greater than all the larger e-vehicles mixed. Congratulations and thanks — you’re heading in the right direction.
Take a look at RMI’s Powering Electrical Two- and Three-Wheelers with Rural Minigrids in Nigeria and India to be taught extra.
Q8: Have the carbon prices of Virgin Galactic business flights been calculated, and if that’s the case, what are they? I’ve the identical query for bitcoin currencies. (Carol O.)
ABL: Some estimates have been revealed (e.g. in The Dialog, the Guardian, and Inside Local weather Information) however I’ve not checked any of them, and recommend you ask Virgin Galactic, which has most likely executed the evaluation. Black carbon could also be a extra regarding rocket emission than CO2. I haven’t tracked whether or not hydrogen/oxygen rockets are a practical candidate.
Bitcoin has a big power/carbon literature, summarized right here. Fortuitously, if worthwhile makes use of are discovered for cryptocurrency, there are orders-of-magnitude less-energy-intensive methods to create it than Bitcoin’s out of date proof-of-work methodology.
By Amory Lovins
© 2021 Rocky Mountain Institute. Revealed with permission. Initially posted on RMI.
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