Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute has been showing
people different ways of doing things for years. His "soft path"
has been lionized and mocked. Years ago, on a group's visit to Lovins'
Snowmass home/headquarters, one utility industry executive said
Amory was very smart, interesting and innovative, but his path
was just ridiculous as a notion for the country. Big central
station power was better than building-based energy solutions,
and that was that.
Now the soft path is the cool path. Lovins
has never stopped working, consulting, advising utilities and
industries that were interested in energy efficiency, new
technology and new ways of planning. And now he is seeking
donations to a project RMI calls
Reinventing Fire
-- "driving the business-led transition from oil, coal, and
ultimately natural gas to efficiency and renewables."
The project will focus on four sectors: buildings,
transportation, electricity and industry. In the electricity
area, RMI says its analysts have identified at least four
barriers to developing a zero-carbon system by 2050: "no
compelling vision and plan that demonstrates technical and
economic viability; insufficient progress in capturing, and
often even in recognizing, known energy efficiency potential; an
incomplete understanding of how to manage the many transitions
required for full implementation; and public ignorance and
disinformation about a low- or no-carbon electrical system."
That is a large handful of barriers.
RMI says it is developing an initiative focused on the first
one, with some of the third. Its Next-Generation Utility
program uses a graphical model of how a utility dispatches its
resources to meet changing loads, and the hope is to get
utilities and regulators to understand "the relative risks,
opportunities and economics of organic, small-step-at-a-time
renewable and efficiency vs. 'big-bet' nuclear or coal
sequestration investments."
