Negawatts and negalitres: steps to a sustainable future

Conservation and efficiency should be measured in negawatts (for energy) and negalitres (for water). These steps have been proposed to the UN General Assembly's OWG studying targets and indicators for Sustainable Development Goals. 

The idea originally came to Amory Lovins when a coal-burning utility sent him a bill with a typo: "negawatt" instead of megawatt. Inspiration struck, when he realized that to consumers there was no difference; that avoided use (i.e. conservation by the consumer, or energy efficiency by the producer) would always be cheaper than new "hard energy". A win-win. But North American utilities have a different ideology: they prefer to blindly continue using massive amounts of fossil fuels, to predict endless rises in demand, lure industry with artificially with cheap rates, and lobby legislators to stick it to householders. So his Rocky Mountain Institute has led a campaign for "soft energy" for more than three decades. See his video Reinventing Fire, reviewed in our blog in 2010.

Measuring energy in negawatts negalitres would not only demonstrate cost savings. It would deliver more human benefit from the same throughput of resources, a concept that needs to be applied to all products of the Earth if planetary boundaries are to be respected, and human needs to be met.

Ecojustice: planetary boundaries and human needs: Kate Raworth's Oxfam doughnut

According to Lovins, gradual but mindful personal lifestyle changes can provide:

20% of negawatts from personal conservation + 20% from energy efficiency = 40% reduction

courtesy smartenergyliving.org

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists' figures, that is the equivalent of eliminating over 500 coal plants! Despite the claims of industry lobbyists, the process could be gradual, eliminate no jobs, and start with the dirtiest plants. A mandatory 5% yearly reduction in all fossil and mineral energy sources over 17 years would result in over 80% reduction in CO2 emissions and noxious pollutants.

And renewable energy increase of 5% a year is quite possible! For example, by solar rooftops. They may already be cheaper than normally generated electricity, according to to new report by Rocky Mountain Institute.

References: RMI, The Economics of grid defection, Feb 2014; OWG, Focus areas of the SDGs, Feb 2014; GEAS report Feb 2014, summarizing IPCC5 and UNEP EmissionsGap Report 2013.

Related concepts: Herman Daly on "throughput" in a steady-state economy, cradle-to-cradle design, Lovins' negawatt and soft energy path (20% efficiency + 20% conservation= 40% reduction in use of present fossil source and GHG emissions), County of Maui water conservation, GCI contraction and convergence, CBDR, Raworth's Oxfam doughnut (satisfy human needs while respecting planetary boundaries), a mandatory renewable portfolio standard, solar rooftops in the US, zero-energy bottle lighting in Kenya.

Thanks to Quaker economic analyst Jack Bradin for this overview. See also David Roberts, "Preventing climate change and adapting to it are not morally equivalent" Grist 16 Sep 2014. 

Renewable power isn’t just safer than nuclear, it’s cheaper -- Amory Lovins

Reprinted from Living on Earth April 14, 2011: Listen to the program.
On March 25, Bruce Gellerman of the Public Radio International program Living on Earth spoke with the co-founder of Rocky Mountain Institute about the true costs of nuclear power.
“Nuclear is such a slow and costly climate solution, it actually reduces and retards climate protection" -- Lovins

LOE: There are “dangerously high” radiation levels in water leaking from Reactor number 3 at Japan’s Fukushima plant. At our deadline, operators still struggling to gain control of the facility, fear the core might be breached. Prime minister Kan calls the situation “grave and unpredictable” and officials are urging those within 19 miles of the nuclear plant to leave voluntarily, and avoid eating many kinds of green vegetables.To say the least, the nuclear disaster in Japan has refocused attention on the future of the atom as a source of energy. But the threat of global climate change has led even some die hard environmentalists to reconsider and embrace nuclear power. But not Amory Lovins. He’s chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado. Amory Lovins, welcome to Living on Earth!
LOVINS: Thank you.
LOE: So is it possible that we can meet our carbon reduction targets without nuclear power?
LOVINS: Of course! Not only that, but we could do so more effectively and more cheaply. It is quite true that if a nuclear plant displaces a coal plant that would replace carbon emissions.
But if you spent the same money on efficiency, renewables and combined heat and power, you would reduce the carbon emissions by about two to ten times more and about 20 to 40 times faster. So nuclear is such a slow and costly climate solution, it actually reduces and retards climate protection, compared with a best buys first approach.
LOE: When you say it’s slow, isn’t it people like you that are holding up the process with lawsuits, holding up the process of licensing nuclear power plants?
LOVINS: Not in the least! I know the industry likes to blame environmental groups — of which, by the way, we are not one — for holding up licensing for several decades. New nuclear power plants in this country are offered subsidies that now rival or exceed their total construction costs.
And yet, even though that’s been true since 2005, three years before the financial crash, they’ve been unable to raise a penny of private capital, simply because the cost and risks are unfinanceable. Wall Street will not invest in them — it’s an utterly unfinanceable technology, and it’s obvious why — it’s grossly uncompetitive.
LOE: But can renewables, like wind for example, produce enough energy, enough density to replace nuclear power plants, which are huge and hugely powerful. And, plus, the wind doesn’t blow on calm days.
LOVINS: Yeah, well, that’s two separate points. The first one — I’m afraid the industry got it backwards. Actually, if you properly do the math — and count if you count the whole nuclear fuel cycle, not just the power plant, not just the core of the reactor, but the occlusion zone, the uranium mining and so on, it turns out that wind power uses hundreds or thousands of times less land per kilowatt hour, than nuclear does.
Even solar photovoltaics are equal to or might be better than nuclear in that respect. As for the wind not blowing and the sun not shining all the time, that’s true. Every kind of power plant can fail. They differ, however, how much fails at once, how often, how long and for what reasons and how predictably. You can predict pretty well when wind or solar will not work, but you cannot predict when a nuclear plant will fail.
They break without warning about three to five percent of the time — big coal nuclear plants are down about ten or twelve percent of the time — and for that reason, we’ve designed grids for over a century to cope with that intermittence that every power plant suffers from. So you don’t depend on any single plant, you depend on the whole grid.
So it turns out, if you diversify renewables by type so they’re not all affected by weather the same way, you diversify them by location, so they don’t all see the same weather at the same time, and you integrate them with the resources on the grid, both power plants and ways to save or shift electric use, then you can have a largely, or wholly renewable electric supply system at very reasonable cost, with greater reliability and resilience than we have right now.
LOE: I find it a little bit ironic, you know — I see in these pictures from Japan — and if they had put a little bit — if they had put a wind turbine on top of the nuclear complex there, the plant might have had power and would still be running.
LOVINS: Actually, the wind machines in the vicinity were not affected by the earthquake and tsunami, and the utilities have been calling for them to crank out every bit of juice they can to help keep the grid up. Look, here’s a quick summary of what’s going on with nuclear in the world. At the end of 2010, there were 66 nuclear units, officially listed as “under construction” worldwide.
You look a little closer, you’ll find a dozen of them have been listed as “under construction” for over 20 years, 45 of them have no official start up date, half of them are late. All 66 of them are in centrally planned power systems, not a single one of them is a free-market purchase. And since 2007, nuclear growth has added less electricity to our supply each year, then even the costliest renewable — solar power — and it will probably never catch up.
LOE: But they’re having rolling blackouts in Japan right now because they don’t have the nuclear power plants online.
LOVINS: Of course if you lose a lot of capacity, you can be short. And they were already a bit short. But I would actually view that as a drawback of nuclear power in two respects. First, to make it cheap, they tried to put a bunch of plants in one place, which was always a bad idea, because if something goes wrong with one plant, you can’t even get in to fix the others and keep them from developing serious problems.
Second, nuclear plants are shut down abruptly, when there’s a loss of grid connection, like in the tsunami. And the trouble with that is, it is then very hard to restart the plant. So in 2003, we had a big blackout in the northeastern US, nine plants were running perfectly until the blackout and then they went to zero, and it took two weeks to get them all back up. And so they’re like an anti-peaker, they’re guaranteed unavailable when you most need them. Renewables don’t have that problem.
LOE: Amory Lovins is the chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado. Well, Mr. Lovins, thank you so very much.
LOVINS: You’re welcome.

Building a green economy -- Amory Lovins

Climaxing three decades of research and expert discussions, Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute offers this vision of a "green capitalist" transition in the USA. (français en bas)
Building on its 2004 synthesis "Winning the Oil Endgame", RMI's "Reinventing Fire" shows technology that exists, that works, and that makes money. It aims to move the US debate from "it’s impossible" and "how much will it cost?" to "here’s how" and "how can we invest in the next 5 years?"

For full details, see the RMI webpage Reinventing Fire links to proposals for green architecture, transport, manufacturing, and energy -- "a peer-reviewed, industry-validated roadmap of practical steps toward an efficient, resilient, cost-effective, all-renewable energy system".
[Thanks to Bill Curry for calling this to our attention. - Ed.]

En français: lire Andrée Mathieu, Développement durable - Pourquoi pas «réinventer le feu» dans Le Devoir 23 Sep 2010 et d'autres thèmes dans Le Devoir - environnement.