[target 50–60m, actual 76m incl 73-87 on materialss] Integrative design for radical energy and materials efficiency at lower cost IIASA internal seminar Laxenburg, 02 September 2019 M OUN KY T C A I O N R I N E STIT U T Amory B. Lovins Cofounder and Chairman Emeritus, RMI (www.rmi.org) Independent contractor, Lovins Associates LLC [email protected] Copyright © 2019 Lovins Associates LLC. All rights reserved. Thank you for this opportunity to “re-mind” you about how to design whole systems for radical efficiency in using energy, water, metals, and other resources. The practice I’ll summarize applies orthodox engineering principles but asks different design questions in a different order and therefore gets very different answers. I recently presented this material as a six-day intensive course, and my team is developing various other tools to help turn this approach from rare to common. * Clean watts are the easy part I won’t be talking today (rather tomorrow) about energy supply. Modern renewables now provide two-thirds of the world’s net additions of electric capacity, thanks to their powerful business case. Our bigger challenge is capturing modern negawatts. * Reduced energy intensity has had 30× the impact of renewable growth (United States, 1965–2018p, not weather-normalized, EIA data) 250 Primary energy use if at 1975 efficiency and structure 200 1975–2018p savings Energy saved by reduced intensity from intensity reduction: 150 2,589 qBTU 100 Primary energy use, 1965–1975 Actual primary energy use 50 Growth in renewable energy use 1975–2018p growth in total renewable output: U.S. primary energy use (quadrillion BTU/y) U.S. primary energy 0 87 qBTU 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 Few people realize that the world’s biggest energy “source,” bigger than oil, is the energy saved just since 1990, two-thirds by more-efficient end-use technologies. If the United States’ * total primary energy * demand had kept growing in * lockstep with GDP since 1975, the US would have have used this much energy. Instead, the US * cut that use by more than * half, saving cumulative energy equivalent to 25 years of current use. Meanwhile, * renewable output doubled —yet with 30x less cumulative * impact than the savings. Renewables get virtually all the headlines, because they’re visible, while energy is invisible, and the energy you don’t use is almost unimaginable. Yet saved energy is avoiding about twice as much carbon each year as renewable growth—and the potential savings keep growing. * Heresy Happens US primary energy intensity, 1975–2017 1.25 Government and Industry Forecasts, ~1975 1 Actual 0.75 0.5 Lovins, Foreign Affairs, Fall 1976 Per Dollar of Real GDP 0.25 Index of U.S. Primary Energy Index of U.S. Primary Energy Reinventing Fire, 2011 0 1975 1990 2005 2020 2035 2050 Around 1975, US government and industry all said the * energy needed to make a dollar of GDP could never drop. * A year later I heretically suggested it could drop 72% in 50 years. * So far it’s dropped 58% in 43 years. Yet just the innovations already added by 2010 * can save another threefold, twice what I originally thought, at a third the real cost. Today that looks conservative, because “integrative design”—optimizing buildings, vehicles, and factories as whole systems, not as piles of parts—can often make very big energy savings cost less than small or no savings, turning diminishing returns into increasing returns. * How low can we go in the energy limbo? steelasophical.com “…85% of energy demand could be practically avoided using current knowledge and available technologies” Cullen J Allwood J (2010) Theoretical efficiency limits in energy conversion devices, Energy 35(5):2059–2069, doi:10.1016/j.energy.2010.01.024 Cullen J Allwood J Borgstein E (2011) Reducing Energy Demand: What Are the Practical Limits? Envtl Sci Tech 45(4):1171–1718, doi:10.1021/es102641n Professor Allwood’s group at Cambridge University says global energy use in 2005 was only about one-ninth as efficient as physics allows—that is, Second Law efficiency averaged ~11% (vs. ~14% in the US)—so including passive options too, they said * “85% of energy demand could be practically avoided using current knowledge and available technologies.” I think that’s a bit conservative, but whatever the right number is, integrative design gets us closer, cheaper, as I’ll illustrate with diverse examples that start in other sectors to set up some concepts I’ll then elaborate for industrial systems. [Of course, apparent thermodynamic limits can often be evaded by redefining the desired changes of state. Rather than just improving lighting equipment, we can open the curtain to admit daylight. Rather than developing a better car, we can design our cities so people are already largely where they want to be and needn’t go somewhere else. Rather than developing a more-efficient cement plant, we can switch to biomimetic or natural materials, or change our business models and reward systems to wring more structural performance from less concrete, or even refine urban design and societal values so we build less and need less.] * Geological reserves are a small part of resources Schematic comparison of reserves One of many variants of the canonical McKelvey diagram used by the US and resources (by NERC for British Geological Survey and worldwide Geological Survey) Orebodies are limited. Energy efficiency isn’t (practically). Economic geologists know that a mineral’s “reserves”—identified deposits profitably extractable with current technology and price—are only a small part of the resource base. * Most energy analysts also narrowly define reserves of energy efficiency, like the bright-green zone in these mineral resource definitions. But the actual energy efficiency reserves are severalfold larger than are now typically recognized and captured. The missing majority is hiding in plain view, exploitable by integrative design. But this geological analogy breaks down on cost. Orebodies are finite assemblages of atoms, while energy efficiency resources are infinitely expandable assemblages of ideas, depleting only stupidity—a very abundant resource. * A major scientific paper on integrative design https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aad965 Chinese and Japanese translations are at https://rmi.org/insight/how-big-is-the-energy-efficiency-resource/ Chinese and Japanese translations are at https://rmi.org/insight/how-big-is-the-energy-efficiency-resource/ That’s documented in a year-old peer-reviewed paper called “How big is the energy efficiency resource?” Its evidence across all sectors shows that unlike oil or copper, most new energy-efficiency reserves cost less than current savings, because they come not from adding more or fancier widgets but from using fewer and simpler widgets—more artfully chosen, combined, timed, and sequenced. Before explaining how do we do this magic, let’s start with a little mental calisthenic. * Edwin H. Land (1909–91) “People who seem to have had a new idea have often just stopped having an old idea.” 不 忘 初 心 Bù wàng chū xīn Shoshin wasuru bekarazu 初心忘るべからず Don’t forget original mind –Avataṃsaka Sūtra, མདོཕལཔཆ, 華嚴經, 대방광불화엄경 One of my early mentors, the inventor Edwin Land, said, “Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.” He also said, * “People who seem to have had a new idea have often just stopped having an old idea.” * Asian tradition similarly urges us to seek original mind, beginner’s mind, child mind—opening ourselves to new ideas by shedding all assumptions and preconceptions. * The Nine Dots Problem So in that spirit, here’s an example from CalTech’s late great aerodynamicist Paul MacCready: For decades, textbooks on creative thinking have posed this problem as “Find the solution that connects these nine dots with just four lines without lifting your pen from the paper.” So you’re supposed to try this...or this...solution that won’t work... * The Nine Dots Problem ...until you think “outside the box” (which is where the expression comes from). But one day, a student startled her professor by saying she’d solved the problem with just three lines. Gee, four was hard enough! How do you do it with just three lines? Dots are infinitely small. Hmmm...wait a minute, these are rather plump dots, and you don’t actually have to go through their center, so if your paper is wide enough... * The Nine Dots Problem ...you can do this! The students then started to feel liberated, and started solving the problem with just one line! Here are a few of their many solutions...* origami solution If you’re Japanese, you might think of the origami solution....* geographer’s solution Or if you’re a geographer, you might use a very long line....* mechanical engineer’s solution Or if you’re a mechanical engineer, a tool-using critter, you might take a tool called a scissors to cut out the dots and impale them….* statistician’s solution Or if you’re a statistician, you might crumple up the paper, and if you stab it with the pencil over and over again enough times, eventually you’ll go through all nine dots at the same instant. The solution I liked best came from a nine-year-old girl who said, “You didn’t say it had to be a thin line...* “wide line” solution ...so I used a really thick line!” Thus as Paul MacCready said, this “tyranny of the word the”—find the solution with four lines—puts us back in the box and keeps us from being more creative in finding more elegantly frugal solutions. So with beginner’s mind, never having built a house before, and therefore not knowing what was impossible, 37 years ago I did the conceptual and energy design of the owner-builder house…* Lovins House, Old Snowmass, Colorado (1983) …where Judy and I live 2200m up in the mountains near Aspen, and * temperatures used to drop to –44˚C, with up to 39 days of continuous midwinter cloud.