The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins first described the idea of ‘brittle power’ in a book published twenty-five years (!) ago. Modern energy systems, he warned, were highly vulnerable to shocks, ‘easily shattered by accident or malice.’
In a recent interview with the excellent Grist magazine, Lovins describes his efforts to promote a more resilient energy system in Iraq:
Some of us have made three attempts at [bringing decentralized power to Iraq] and there’s a fourth now under discussion. The first three attempts, the third of which was backed by the Iraqi power minister, were vetoed by the U.S. political authorities on the grounds that they’d already given big contracts to Bechtel, Halliburton, et. al to rebuild the old centralized system, which of course the bad guys are knocking down faster than it can be put back up.
Lovins argues that ‘an efficient, diverse, dispersed, renewable electricity system’ not only increases energy security, it also protects neighbourhoods from insurgents. A new spin, as it were, on giving power to the people…
Lovins also continues to promote the use of renewables by armies:
About a third of our army’s wartime fuel use is for generator sets, and nearly all of that electricity is used to air-condition tents in the desert, known as “space cooling by cooling outer space.” We recently had a two-star Marine general commanding in western Iraq begging for efficiency and renewables to untether him from fuel convoys, so he could carry out his more important missions.
This is a very teachable moment for the military. The costs, risks, and distractions of fuel convoys and power supplies in theater have focused a great deal of senior military attention on the need for not dragging around this fat fuel-logistics tail — therefore for making military equipment and operations several-fold more energy efficient.
Finally, unlike my co-author Alex Evans, Lovins still holds out hope for the intelligent use of biofuels:
We suggest that U.S. mobility fuels could be provided without displacing any food crops. You could do it just with switchgrass and the like on conservation reserve land. Being a perennial, which can even be grown in polyculture, switchgrass and its relatives would hold the soil better because they’re much deeper rooted than the shallow-rooted annuals with which that erosion-prone land is often planted. And of course the perennials don’t need any cultivation or other inputs.
Just a few weeks ago my colleagues and I led the redesign of a cellulosic ethanol plant — we were able to cut out very large fractions of its energy and capital need by designing it differently. There are other process innovations we’re aware of that would achieve similar results. I would not write off biofuels at all.
