Amory Lovins, Hon. AIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Amory B. Lovins is the co-founder, chairman, and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute and the author or co-author of 29 books. He is most known for defining the end-use/least-cost approach to the energy problem, an approach that asks how much energy, at what quality, from what source, and at what scale will do the task in the cheapest way. A physicist by training, he has been active in energy, resource, environmental, and security policy for more than 30 years and has advised numerous heads of state and top-level companies on resource conservation solutions.

Education and training: There were two parallel tracks in my formal education. One was in physical sciences. Then, parallel with that, I studied music, classics, math, linguistics, some law, a little medicine, and a lot of mountain photography. Of course, in my current line of work, which has gone on now for 30-odd years, one tends to pick up a couple of new disciplines a year. So, by now, I’m pretty eclectic.

Inspiration for founding a resource conservation think tank: It’s actually a think-and-do tank. My then-wife and colleague, Hunter Lovins, and I thought if we set up our own outfit, we could gather a handful of colleagues and be more effective. Well, it quickly got out of hand. We now have about 80 people at RMI, although Hunter left in 2002. We just wanted to do more and better work to try to make the world better. The short version of what we do is to create abundance by design. Formally, RMI’s mission is to foster the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining, but abundance by design is a lot shorter. Our hopes of being more effective with colleagues than without have certainly been richly fulfilled. We’ve been blessed with many very talented people.

In early March, I kicked myself upstairs as chairman and chief scientist. I’d previously been CEO. Now we have a real CEO, Michael Potts, who has control of the ship, so I just get to figure out where to steer it and do the fun stuff. I’m concentrating full time therefore on thought leadership, strategic influence, and special projects without having the management responsibility anymore. That’s very liberating.

Current read: I’m reading 1421, which is the book about how China discovered the new world. I read very widely, although travel gets in the way.

Downtime activity: I try to catch up on sleep. My fiancé, Judy Hill, and I are doing increasing amounts of landscape photography, which is her profession. In fact, some of my recent work is in the guest artist section of her gallery at Judyhill.com. I’d also like to get back to music. I haven’t given a recital for 36 years. I’m in danger of losing most of my repertoire if I don’t get back to it.

Legacy: Probably my biggest legacy so far is having redefined the energy problem and set the world on a course toward a sustainable and profitable energy solution, which brings with it solutions to climate change, oil dependence, nuclear proliferation, much global poverty and instability, and many other problems of environment, development, and security.

The carbon offset trend: High-quality offsets that are independently certified add flexibility and help buy the most carbon savings per dollar by eliciting the cheapest options first, so I’m generally in favor of capping trade systems. However, we advise our clients to do their own carbon savings first because this has many other advantages. Typically, our new building designs save about 80 to 90 percent of normal energy use while reducing capital costs and making the space more pleasant, healthful, and productive to be in. The reducing-capital-costs part will surprise many who assume that energy efficiency costs more and the more of it you get, the more steeply the cost rises. Our integrated design practice typically turns that from diminishing returns into expanding returns by optimizing the whole building for multiple benefits rather than isolated components for single benefits.

What architects can do to influence demand of sustainable and resource efficient buildings: First, make sure they practice integrated design so that big savings cost less than small or no savings, and that overcomes the main market obstacle, which is many developers’ or clients’ assumption that efficiency must be a lot more expensive. In Class A offices for example, we typically find that order-of-magnitude efficiency improvements reduce capital costs 3-5 percent while greatly improving comfort, amenity, and productivity; improving space efficiency reduces costs 5-6 percent, so it’s a very compelling business case for the client, but you can only do that if you know how to design that way.

Secondly, I would urge firms good at that to market their design services with performance-based fees, which the AIA’s legal folks told me some years ago can be accommodated in the normal contract form for services beyond the normal scope. Performance-based fees reward the design professionals for what they save, not what they spend. We tried five experiments with this and it has a very salutary effect on design. The approach I’m describing can work for any program, client, and climate, but it requires an unusual degree of coordination with the other design professionals, the client, the builders, and those who will commission, operate, and occupy the building. This typically requires an intensive trans-disciplinary charrette process. It cannot be well-achieved by the usual more segmented approach of a sequence of designers tossing their piece over the transom to the next one. It really takes a degree of a whole system of integration that hasn’t been widely practiced since the Victorian era, before we started getting specialized and stove piped. But the rewards are great in the quality of design, the delight of clients, and the future of the world.

Designing homes for efficiency: Most people want the same for their kids and communities at home that they want for their business or government at work. The main difference is that the homebuilding industry is even more conservative by and large than commercial design and construction. It’s far more fragmented. The basic unit of production is still often the pick-up truck, if you leave out the big merchant builders. There are more peculiar regulatory obstacles when you’re dealing in a highly granular way with local building inspectors who may not yet be up to speed on new techniques. Finance may be less imaginative, and appraisers less well informed. Also, of course, householders tend to have much higher implicit discount rates, which is to say they’re short of cash and take a very short-term view of investments and savings. So, it’s even more important if you’re a residential designer to master integrated design, but we’ve so far demonstrated houses that are comfortable with no heating or cooling equipment and cost less to build in climates from -47F to +115F, and neither of those is a limit. In fact, my home and RMI’s headquarters building is comfortable down to minus 47F in a climate at 7,100 feet elevation. We can have frost any day of the year and 39 days of continuous mid-winter cloud, yet I don’t have a central heating system. I didn’t need one and it was cheaper up front not to put one in. Inside the house, I’ve so far harvested 28 banana crops with no furnace.

We used super insulation, super windows, air-to-air heat exchangers, good passive design, and mass and zone coupling. Those things saved 99 percent of the space-heating energy. The last 1 percent is from a couple of rarely run wood stoves because I have to burn the energy study somehow. The net effect on capital cost was an $1,100 decrease in 1983. Today, it would be even cheaper. I then took that saved money plus another $6,000, which was $1.50 per square foot, and invested it in saving also 99 percent of the water heating energy, 90 percent of the household electricity, and half of the water. All the savings together paid for themselves in 10 months with 1983 technology. Today, we could do a lot better. At the moment, I’m halfway through replacing the rather old and tired banana jungle with a new one and the six new banana trees are growing over an inch a day.

On alternate fuels in the home: A fair number of people burn anything from bio-diesel to even corn, or, of course, the ubiquitous wood pellets, but super insulation is even cheaper. The basic trick in my building was to balance heat gains and losses within a percent or so by investing in a supposedly non-cost-effective amount of insulation and super windows that insulate like 8-12 sheets of glass, but look like two and cost less than three. When I say supposedly non-cost-effective, I mean they didn’t save enough energy to pay for themselves, but they also eliminated the entire heating system, namely furnace, ducts, fans, pipes, pumps, wires, controls, and fuel supplier arrangements. On that basis, they were highly cost effective. The total capital cost as I said went down $1,100, but every engineering textbook—at least in English—that we have scrutinized on this subject gets the methodology wrong and tells you to add only as much insulation as will pay for itself out of saved energy over the years without counting the capital costs of the avoidable heating system. Similarly, in the tract house where Pacific Gas and Electric Company and Davis Energy Group eliminated the cooling system, the last seven measures required to do that didn’t save enough energy to pay for themselves, but were very attractive when you realized that you would get rid of the last bit of air conditioner and its duct work.

How do we get people to think more wisely about energy? The way any market becomes mindful: you start paying attention. Certainly the energy costs now are ample to do that. It’s interesting that, as my colleague Dr. Joel Swisher, PE, points out, the Bush administration backed away from Kyoto because they were afraid it would take a $50 a ton carbon tax. Over the next few years, largely because of their other policies, we got the equivalent of an $80-150 a ton carbon tax. It didn’t wreck the economy. It just transferred a lot of our wealth to other parts of the world without getting the framework in place to save the associated carbon. I think it’s actually less important to get the prices right, although that’s helpful, than to equip people to respond to the prices they see. That is a process we call barrier busting, which ought to be at the top of the policy agenda.

What else should architects be doing? The 2030 Challenge that AIA, ASHRAE, and USGBC are leading is a big and wonderful step forward. I think the profession has a wonderful opportunity to hone and apply its skills in the entire building stock—new and retrofit. Structures, which are mostly buildings, are 85 percent of the fixed capital assets of the U.S. Buildings use 40 percent of the world’s materials flow and energy. They use about 69 percent of U.S. electricity and are directly responsible—not counting materials flows—for releasing two-fifths of the CO2, so the built environment is actually a bigger carbon emitter than either industry or transport. In some other countries, even more so. It’s 60 percent of carbon release in the U.K., for example.

This is a design problem. It must be overcome by designers, and it’s a very worthy life’s work, both to do better going forward and to fix everything we’ve designed before. I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be an architect than now when we have not just an aesthetic and commercial but also a survival reason to create a built environment that takes nothing, wastes nothing, does no harm, and creates delight when entered, high performance and health when occupied, and regret when departed.