Comments on: Amory Lovins: Efficiency Burns Brightest

By: garykahanak

garykahanak — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:23:19 +0000

Lovins has done a great job advancing conservation and efficiency as solutions to our energy crisis, but he needs to get off his anti-nuclear bent. Sure, in an energy-obese country like USA there are huge opportunities for gains to be made in conservation and efficiency; that should be and always will be a priority. But we're trying to solve a GLOBAL energy problem. What about areas of the world that have much higher population densities, along with much more limited opportunities for renewable energy, all the while having the problem of NOT ENOUGH POWER in the first place to meet even the basics of civilized human existence? Where are the opportunities for conservation and efficiency here?

It's time to put aside our green ideologies, force ourselves to look objectively at the situation from a global perspective, and get the USA back in the game of being a moral and technological leader. See The Science Council on Global Initiatives (www.thesciencecouncil.com) for informed approaches and solutions.

By: garykahanak

garykahanak — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:23:19 +0000

By: chriscloutier

chriscloutier — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:51:13 +0000

charles

thanks for the clarification! when talking about bloatware, he didn't happen to call out adobe acrobat by name did he?

will you please post a link to the ppt when up?

By: charles_shereda

charles_shereda — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:52:01 +0000

Glad you mentioned it! One of the really interesting tidbits in his presentation was about pipe design, and how much energy could be saved simply by redesigning piping to not have 90 degree bends in it but to have more Y junctions instead. It's incredible the savings that can be achieved that way – as much as 75 to 80 percent, evidently. By better designing your piping/ductwork, you can reduce the size of your pumps and fans and save even more in capital expenditures – that's what Amory means by 'Integrative Design.' Since 30 percent of the world's electricity is used to power pumps and fans, the savings potential is significant.

By: charles_shereda

charles_shereda — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:45:55 +0000

Hi Chris-

Regarding your comment about conservation – I could have been more explicit; in saying 'shutting them off for the night' I was referring to powering them down with wake-on-lan capability. Even if they were being powered off completely, there would probably be some load examination beforehand, since a data center is usually made of racks of nodes acting as a server farm or as a cluster. Doing that load examination and then making decisions based on that would still constitute an efficiency measure, I believe, even if there are pretty basic and manual steps involved. One efficiency measure that Amory talked about was getting rid of bloatware and writing cleaner code that consumes less CPU. Not often thought of as efficiency, but I think that fits the definition too. Interesting stuff for sure.

By: nickaster

nickaster — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:39:47 +0000

Hi Chris. The presentations are not online yet, but we'll add a link as soon as they are

By: kellyeo

kellyeo — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:53:25 +0000

He's referring to efficiency in design in everything from piping/ducting systems, to building design and national electrical grid transmission efficency.

By: chriscloutier

chriscloutier — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:17:45 +0000

Nice piece. Is there a link to his presentation?

But, not sure if you or Amory is confusing efficiency with conservation. Turning off computers in an IT data-center is a conservation measure; using computers that sleep when not in use and wake-up when needed is an efficiency measure. Seems like a silly semantic difference but utltimately one is largely behavior-related (conservation) while the other is largely technology related (efficiency).