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https://switchedon.reneweconomy.com.au/content/weve-barely-scratched-the-surface-of-how-energy-efficiency-can-help-the-energy-transition>
"Amory Lovins has been writing and talking about energy efficiency for over 50
years but he says the need to use energy more productively and efficiently is
now more acute than ever.
At the same time, the scope for saving energy is also bigger than ever.
Lovins' views have been crucial to our understanding of energy efficiency. He's
advised major firms and numerous governments, authored hundreds of papers and
books, and taught at several universities most recently Stanford.
Time
magazine named him one of the world’s most influential people.
“We’ve barely scratched the surface of how much efficiency is available,”
Lovins told the
SwitchedOn podcast. “It's about two to four times what I
thought in the 70s, and as we learn more about it, especially what we can do
with design, the potential just keeps getting bigger and cheaper.”
Whilst enormous gains have been made in energy efficiency through better
operational practices and technical improvements – turning off appliances,
insulating, plugging cracks and gaps, etc - Lovins says that energy efficiency
is a continuous spectrum that keeps rapidly evolving.
He believes the key to better efficiency now is better design.
“What we haven't yet really tackled is how to design buildings, factories,
processes, equipment, vehicles, as whole systems for multiple benefits. That's
what we call integrative design,” says Lovins. “That is twice as powerful as
the factor two or three efficiency gains that we can get just by switching from
burning fossil fuels.”
In 1976 Lovins predicted that over the next 50 years, the US could nearly
quadruple overall energy efficiency, but by 2010 in a study he called
‘Reinventing Fire,’ he found the savings were twice what he’d previously
thought, but at a third of the cost.
“That's now looking conservative as we learn more about integrative design….
the current evidence shows you could about quintuple end use efficiency by
about 2060, or treble it by about 2040.”"
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
