REINVENTING

FIRE

AMORY LOVINS

a bout th e author
Energy visionary Amory Lovins is the author of hundreds of scientific papers and 31 books, the latest of which is
the 2011 grand synthesis Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era. He cofounded and chairs
Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit think-and-do tank that collaborates with the
private sector to drive the efficient and restorative use of resources.
Amory Lovins adapted his essay Reinventing Fire from Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy
Era (Chelsea Green Publishing), produced by Lovins and his Rocky Mountain Institute colleagues; 2011 by
Rocky Mountain Institute.

This publication is an excerpted chapter from The Energy Reader: Overdevelopment and
the Delusion of Endless Growth, Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner,
eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2012). The Energy Reader is copyright
2012 by the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and published in collaboration with
Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute.
For other excerpts, permission to reprint, and purchasing visit energy-reality.org or
contact Post Carbon Institute.
Photo: EcoFlight. The old fire: The San Juan Generating Station, a coal-burning power
plant in New Mexico, typifies the old energy economy.

Post Ca r bon I nst i t u t e | 613 4t h St r e et, Su i t e 208 | Sa n ta Rosa, Ca li for n i a 95404 USA

Fossil fuels created modern civilization, but their rising

coststo health, security, and economic progress
are starting to eclipse their benefits, undermining the
prosperity and security they enabled. At the same time,
Pull quote here lorem ipsum
technological innovation has quietly been making fossil fuels
dolor sit amet
obsolete. In historys greatest infrastructure shift, spanning
the entire economy, humans are inventing a new fire:
not dug from below but flowing from above, not scarce
but bountiful, and except for a little biofuel, flameless.

ire made us human; fossil fuels made us modern.

Now we need a new fire that makes us secure, safe,
healthy, and durable.
Oil and coal built our civilization. Fossil energy became
the foundation of our wealth, the bulwark of our might,
the unseen metabolic engine of modern life. Yet this
enabler of our civilization, this magic elixir that has
enriched and extended the lives of billions, has also
begun to make our lives more fearful, insecure, costly,
destructive, and dangerous. It puts asthma in our childrens lungs and mercury in their lunchbox tuna. Its
occasional mishaps can shatter economies. Its wealth
and power buy politicians. It drives many of the worlds
rivalries, corruptions, despotisms, and wars. It is changing the composition of Earths atmosphere faster than
at any time in the past 60million years.
In short, the rising costs of fossil fuels are starting to
eclipse their benefits, undermining the prosperity and
security they enabled. Fortunately, these problems are
not necessary to endure, either technologically or economically. We can avoid them in ways that tend to
reduce energy costsbecause technological progress has
quietly been making fossil fuels obsolete.
Whats driving this transformation is basic economics.
By 2009, making a dollar of U.S. gross domestic product used 60percent less oil than in 1975, 63percent

less (directly used) natural gas, 20percent less electricity, and 50percent less total energy. Oil is becoming uncompetitive even at low prices before it becomes
unavailable even at high prices: Peak oil has emerged
in demand before supply. Oil use in the industrialized
nations represented by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) peaked in
2005, U.S. gasoline use in 2007. In 2009, Deutsche
Bank said world oil use could peak around 2016.
With todays technologies, it is possible to build uncompromised, safe, roomy, peppy, electric autos. Redesigning
the entire U.S. automobile fleet to be superefficient
and electrified by 2050 could achieve automotive fuel
economy equivalent to 125250miles per U.S. gallon
(1.01.9 L/100 km) and would save oil at an average cost
below $18per saved barreljust one-fifth of todays
world oil price. Buying that efficiency and electrification instead of burning oil to provide the same services
from todays and officially forecast autos would save
$4trillion. Such drilling under Detroit can win the
equivalent of 1.5 Saudi Arabias or half an OPEC, and
those negabarrels are all domestic, secure, clean, safe,
and inexhaustible. The investments required for these
four- to eightfold more efficient and oil-free autos and
for tripled-efficiency trucks and airplanes could yield a
17percent internal rate of return (IRR) while greatly
reducing risks to the oil and automotive sectors and
to the whole economy. The trucks and planes could
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Lov ins

use advanced biofuels or hydrogen, the trucks could

even burn natural gas, but no vehicles would need oil.
Despite 90percent more automobility, 61percent more
flying, and 118percent more trucking, the most biofuel the United States might need would be less than
one-fourth its current use of mobility fuel. That little
biofuel could be produced two-thirds from wastes and
one-third from cellulosic or algal production that needs
no cropland and protects both soil and climate.
CoalAmericas #4 source of energy services after
efficiency, oil, and gasis a dead man walking,
says Deutsche Banks Kevin Parker. Ignoring coals
$180530billion annual hidden costs, mainly to
public health, Americas coal-fired power plants now
cost more to run than the cost of displacing them by
running existing gas-fired plants more and adopting
a level of electrical productivity that ten states, on
average, already achieved in 2005. Thats why U.S.
coal use peaked in 2005, and in 20052010, coal lost
25percent of its share of U.S. electrical services to
gas, efficiency, and renewables. Nonnuclear alternatives cheaper than new coal plants could displace U.S.
coal power more than 23times. Once suffices.
Asia is the world leader in adding renewable power;
in 2010 only 59percent of Chinas net new capacity
was coal-fired (versus 38 percent renewable, 2percent
nuclear) and coals share of Chinas new generation
capacity is shrinking. Chinas net new orders of coalfired plants fell by half during 20062010. China now
leads the world in five renewable energy technologies,
and it aims to lead in all of them as the core of its next
economy. America, where coal now employs fewer
people than wind power, remains politically preoccupied with its previous economy.
Yet solar and wind power have become market winners as their prices plummetby three-fourths in three
years for photovoltaic modules. In roughly 20states and
even in cloudy Holland, entrepreneurs now offer to
install solar power on your roof for no money down,
and thereby to beat your utility bill. The tipping point
where alternatives win on pure price is not decades in
the future; it is here and now, forming the fulcrum

R ein v enting Fir e

of economic transformation. Across all energy uses,

efficiency and renewables now offer effective, reliable, secure, and affordable replacements for fossil fuel.
Rapidly scaling those solutions will define winners and
losers between firmsand among nations.
Renewable power, with its lower risk and competitive
cost, added half the worlds 20082010 new generating capacity. In 2010 worldwide, renewable generators
other than big hydro dams got $151billion of private
investment and surpassed nuclear powers total installed
capacity by adding more than 60 gigawatts. That much
solar capacity is now manufacturable every year.
In this global race, the United States capital, technology, and entrepreneurship equip it for success. Yet its
been held back by lack of coherent vision and overdependence on gridlocked government. In 2010, congressional wrangling helped halve U.S. wind power
installations, while China doubled its wind power
capacity for the fifth year running and blew past its
2020 wind power target. During 20082010, America
slipped from #1 to #3 in clean-energy investment, then
temporarily rebounded to #1 in 2011 thanks to federal initiatives trying to fill gaps in the wounded capital marketsbut those initiatives expire in 20112012,
while Chinas policy remains consistent. Since 2005,
U.S. electricitys renewable share crawled from 9percent to 10 percent while Portugals soared from 17percent to 45percent. Germany, with less sun than Seattle,
added more solar power capacity in June 2010 than the
United States did in all of 2010, and more in December
2011 than the United States did in all of 2011. By mid2011, more workers made German solar equipment
than made American steel. Germanys efficiency-andrenewables strategy has helped cut its unemployment
rate to an eleven-year low.
Japan is moving the same way, but not as fast as India.
Brazil and Korea are jumping rapidly into clean energy.
As wind power wins power auctions across South
America and an unsubsidized solar power plant (the
worlds most productive) in Chiles northern desert beats
the grid price, Chile, with perhaps the worlds best portfolio of renewable energy options, is trying to decide
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whether to let them (and energy efficiency) outcompete

traditional projects that are attempting to use political
clout to make up for their lack of cost effectiveness.
Worldwide, distributed electricity production is running away with the electric-generation market: About
91percent of new electricity in 2008 came from renewables (excluding big hydro dams) and combined-heatand-power. All renewables now deliver a fifth of the
worlds electricity from a fourth of the worlds generating capacity. In 2011, the clean-energy market won
$260billion of investment and attracted its trillionth
dollar since 2004. All countries hoping to build or retain
economic dynamism must catch up with this multi-trillion-dollar, once-in-a-civilization business opportunity.
How? Use our most effective institutionsprivate
enterprise, coevolving with civil society and sped by
military innovationto end-run ineffective institutions like the U.S. Congress. In autumn 2011, such
a strategy was detailed in Rocky Mountain Institutes
independent energy vision for American leadership,
Reinventing Fire, with forewords by the CEO of Shell
Oil and the chairman of Exelon. Its fresh competitive
strategies can win the clean energy race, not forced by
public policy but led by business for durable advantage.
Reinventing Fire maps market-based paths for running a
158percentbigger U.S. economy in the year 2050 (an
assumed growth target based on official projections, not
personal preferences) with no oil, no coal, no nuclear
energy, one-third less natural gas, and no new inventions. Moreover, this could be accomplished at a netpresent-value cost of $5trillion below business as usual,
assuming all externalities are valued at zero (a conservatively low estimate, as oils hidden economic and military costs alone exceed $1.5trillion a year, excluding
any damage to public health and environment).
The business case for efficiency is so compelling that
adopting it would require no new federal taxes, subsidies, mandates, or laws. Policy innovations that unlock
and speed the transition could be implemented with
no Act of Congressinstead by federal administrative
actions and at the state level, where utilities are already

R ein v enting Fir e

largely regulated (but 36 states still reward them for

selling more energy and penalize them for cutting your
bill). The key automotive reform could also be readily adopted by states: Feebates, a revenue-neutral way
to help auto buyers use societal discount rates, tripled
the speed of improving new French autos efficiency in
just two years.
If General Dwight Eisenhower couldnt solve a problem, he made it bigger, expanding its boundaries until
added options and synergies made it soluble. In the same
vein, Reinventing Fire integrates all four energy-using
sectorstransportation, buildings, industry, and electricityand four kinds of innovationstechnology,
design, policy, and business strategy. Together these are
much more than the sum of the parts.
The auto and electricity problems, for example, are
easier to solve together than separately. New design
and manufacturing methods can make ultralight, ultrasafe autos cost-competit ive. Needing half or a third the
power for the same pep then lets electric propulsion
compete too. (BMW, VW, and Audi plan to mass-produce electrified carbon-fiber cars by 2013.) But carbon
fiber and electrification are cheaper when combined:
three steep and synergistic learning curvesin carbon
fiber, automaking, and electric power trainstogether
create a game changer as potent as the shift from type
writers to computers.
Adding tripled-efficiency trucks and planes, and using
all vehicles more productively, enables greatly expanded
mobility fueled by a mixture of electricity, hydrogen,
and advanced biofuels, but needing no oil. Smart vehicles, buildings, and grids could make electric autos not
a burden but a valuable flexibility and storage resource.
That is, by buying electricity from the grid or selling
it back at the right times, a smart electric auto fleet can
help smooth out variations in solar and wind power
generation, reducing the need for fossil-fueled generation and making an 80100percent renewables-powered electricity grid reliable and competitive.
Doubled energy productivity in industry (with a
21percent IRR), tripled or quadrupled in buildings
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(33percent IRR), can profitably shrink electricity

demand despite 84percent more industrial production
and 70percent more floor space. Just investing $0.5trillion to fix buildings, which use three-fourths of U.S.
electricity, can save $1.9trillion. The recent retrofitting
of the Empire State Building and its resultant two-fifths
energy savings with a three-year payback illustrate how
integrative design can often yield expanding returns,
making big energy savings cheaper than small ones:
Remanufacturing all 6,514windows onsite in a temporary window factory on a vacant floor made them
pass light but block heat, reducing winter heat loss by
two-thirds and summer heat gain by half. Adding better daylighting, lighting systems and controls, and office
equipment saved a third of air conditioning on hot days.
This in turn saved $17million of capital cost because
the old chillers could be renewed and reduced rather
than replaced and enlarged. That capital saving helped
pay for the other improvements, cutting the payback to
three years. Applying this approach to a twenty-yearold glass office tower could even save three-fourths of
its energy, slightly cheaper than the normal twenty-year
renovation that saves almost nothing.
The key to this economic magic is integrative design
designing a building, factory, device, or vehicle as a
whole system and optimizing it for multiple benefits,
rather than optimizing isolated components for single
benefits. For example, the middle of my own house,
high in the Rockies where outdoor temperatures used
to fall as low as 47F (44C), is currently ripening its
37th through 39th banana crops with no furnace during a January snowstorm. The house is about 99percent
passive-solar heated, but the superwindows, superinsulation, and ventilation heat recovery that eliminated its
heating system added less construction cost than eliminating the heating system saved. Respending that saved
capital cost plus a bit more also saved about 90percent of the household electricity and 99percent of the
water-heating energy, all with a ten-month payback
using 1983 technology. Todays technology is much
better, so weve just retrofitted it and are measuring
its performance; unfortunately, the monitoring system
seems to be using more electricity than the lights and
appliances its measuring.

R ein v enting Fir e

An even more striking example comes from pumpingthe main use of motors, which use three-fifths of
the worlds electricity. Using fat, short, straight pipes
rather than narrow, long, crooked pipes saves typically
8090percent of the friction in the pipes. Shrinking the
pumps, motors, inverters, and electrical systems more
than pays for the fatter pipes, decreasing total capital
cost. In my own house, this tactic cut friction by about
97percent. Fans and ducts, the second biggest use of
motors, offer similar opportunities. And every unit of
friction saved in pipes or ducts saves about ten times
more fuel, cost, and what Hunter Lovins calls global
weirding back at the power station.
Industry is already ripe in opportunities for better motor
systems and pumps, fans and controls, heat recovery and
insulation. Dow Chemical has already saved $19billion
on $1billion of efficiency investments. But integrative
design can make savings bigger yet cheaper, turning
diminishing returns into expanding returns. Rocky
Mountain Institutes latest $30odd billion worth of
integrative redesign of equipment and processes across
diverse industriesfrom refineries to mines and data
centers to chip fabshas typically reduced expected
energy use by about 3060 percent with a few years
payback on retrofits, or by about 4090+ percent with
generally lower capital cost in new factories. Integrative
design isnt yet included in official studies of energysaving potential, but smart firms are realizing how it
can drive competitive advantage. RMIs Factor Ten
Engineering (10xE) initiative aims to use it to transform how design is done and taught.
Combining modern ways to wring more work out of
each kilowatt-hour could power a 2.6fold bigger U.S.
economy with one-fourth less electricity than now,
eliminating not just coal-fired but also nuclear power
production. Thats good, because as those old plants
retire (virtually all by 2050), replacing them with more
of the same would be so costly and risky that no business
case can be made for it. All 34 new proposed nuclear
plants in the United States cant raise any private capital
despite 100+ percent construction subsidies: At most
a few units may be built, entirely financed by mandatory payments from customers and taxpayers. All
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66reactors under construction worldwide at the end of

2010 were bought by centrally planned power systems.
Nuclear powers death of an incurable attack of market forces strengthens climate protection, because new
nuclear plants are so costly and slow that they would
save about 1020times less carbon per dollar, about
2040times slower, than investing in efficiency and
renewables instead.
Productive and timely use of electricity, combined-heatand-power, reallocated saved natural gas, and a modern
renewables portfolio can enable a diverse, distributed,
reliable, resilient electricity future that costs about
the same as business as usual but manages all its risks,
including economy-shattering blackouts. Replacing
Americas aging, dirty, obsolescent, insecure electricity
system by 2050 will cost about $6trillion in net present
value no matter how we do it. So lets re-architect and
rebuild it to power not just lights and motors but also
competitive advantage, profits, jobs, national security,
environmental stewardship, and public health, while
making the grid so resilient that big cascading black
outs become impossible. Whichever of those outcomes
you care most about, Reinventing Fires pragmatic business strategy makes sense and makes money.
Recent experience and practice also confirm that even
with little or no bulk power storage, diversified and
forecastable renewable generators, integrated with
flexible supply and voluntarily modulated demand,
can deliver highly reliable power at competitive cost.
Four German states in 2010 got 4352percent of their
electricity from wind power by integrating it with the
strong German grid. But even on a continental scale,
diverse renewables can provide 80+ percent of electricity by operating utilities existing assets differently
within smarter grids and using markets that clear faster
and serve larger areas.
Reinventing Fires U.S. findings are highly adaptable
and adoptable elsewhere. The European Climate
Foundation has presented a similarly ambitious road map
for Europes energy transition, as have many countries.
Governments from California (the worlds #8economy) to Germany (#4) and from Denmark to Sweden

R ein v enting Fir e

are successfully implementing aggressive efficiencyand-renewables strategies. California shrank greenhouse gas emissions per dollar of GDP by 30percent in
19902006, and has held per capita use of electricity flat
for three decades while real income per capita grew by
four-fifths. Denmarks GDP grew by two-thirds during
19802009 while energy use fell back to its 1980 level
and carbon emissions fell 21percent. In an average wind
year, Denmark in 2010 could produce 36percent of its
electricity renewably and 53percent from combinedheat-and-power. The average Dane, releasing half the
carbon of the average American, enjoyed a good life,
the most reliable electricity in Europe, and some of its
lowest pretax prices. Denmark is even reorganizing its
grid in cellular fashion (as Cuba successfully did) to
make power supply highly resilientand plans to be
entirely off fossil fuels by 2050.
Developing countries are buying the majority of the
worlds new renewable generating capacity, often in distributed forms like solar cells that bring efficient lighting and other vital services to the 1.6billion humans
who have no electricityleapfrogging over the power
line phase just as cell phones leapt past landline phones.
If developing countries buy efficiency whenever its
cheaper than new electricity supply, they can turn the
power sector, which now devours a fourth of global
development capital, into a net exporter of capital to
fund other development needs. Why? Because making
super-efficient lamps, windows, and the like takes about
a thousand times less capital, and repays it about ten
times faster, than investing instead in supplying more
electricity. Investing in cheap negawatts instead of
costly megawatts is the most powerful, though invisible,
financial lever available to speed global development.
The international Super-eff icient Equipment and
Appliance Deployment project (SEAD), supported
by 23countries, targets the four applianceslights,
refrigerators, air conditioners, and televisionsthat use
three-fifths of household electricity in China, India,
the United States, and the European Union. Most of
those appliances havent yet been built or bought, and
three-fourths are made by just 15firms. SEAD aims to
build them right, saving up to $1trillion and avoiding
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300coal plants. Thats just four household appliances

not the rest, not the other sectors. There are lots more
negawatts to capture.

R ein v enting Fir e

working our undoing. The new energy era can be a

story not of danger, restriction, and impoverishment but
of astounding wealth creation, choice, and opportunity.

China made energy efficiency its top strategic priority

in 2005, not compelled by a treaty but because leaders
like Wen Jiabao understood that China couldnt afford
to develop otherwise. China had already fueled about
70percent of 19802001 economic growth by cutting
energy intensity more than 5percent per year, and is
now regaining that pace. The United States has long
averaged 24 percent lower energy intensity (primary
energy used per dollar of GDP) each year. Just averaging
34 percent worldwide could prevent further climate
damage. Why should that pace be hard, since most of
the growth is in countries like China and India that are
building their infrastructure from scratch and can more
easily build it right than fix it later? And since virtually
everyone who does energy efficiency makes money,
why should this be costly?
The global climate debate has focused on cost, burden,
and sacrifice because negotiators assumed from economic theory that energy efficiency must cost more
than the energy it saves, or wed have bought it already
in their theoretically perfect markets. But actually, most
efficiency isnt yet bought, even in the most competitive
market economies, because of 6080 kinds of widespread and well-documented market failures that we
now know how to turn into business opportunities. In
truth, saving fuel costs less than buying fuel, so climate protection is not costly but profitable. Talking instead about the
resulting profits, jobs, and competitive advantages so
sweetens the conversation that any remaining resistance
should melt faster than the glaciers.
In historys greatest infrastructure shift, humans are
verily inventing a new fire: not dug from below but
flowing from above, not scarce but bountiful, not local
but ubiquitous, not transient but permanent, not costly
but freeand except for a little biofuel, grown in ways
that sustain and endure, flameless.
Efficiently used, this new fire, harnessed by ingenuity
and enterprise, can make energy do our work without
6

ENERGY

Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth

Edited by Tom Butler and George Wuerthner
We have reached a point of crisis with regard to energy...
The essential problem is not just that we are tapping the
wrong energy sources (though we are), or that we are wasteful
and inefficient (though we are), but that we are overpowered,
and we are overpowering nature.
from the Introduction, by Richard Heinberg

In a large-format, image-driven narrative featuring over 150

breathtaking color photographs, ENERGY explores the
impacts of the global energy economy: from oil spills and
mountaintop-removal coal mining to oversized wind farms
and desert-destroying solar power plants. ENERGY lifts the
veil on the harsh realities of our pursuit of energy at any
price, revealing the true costs, benefits, and limitations of
all our energy options.
Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and
Post Carbon Institute. 336 pages, 11.75 x 13.4, 152 color photographs, 5 line illustrations.
$50.00 hardcover, ISBN 978-0970950086, Fall 2012.

The ENERGY Reader

Edited by Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner

What magic, or monster, lurks behind the light switch and

the gas pump? Where does the seemingly limitless
energy that fuels modern society come from? From oil
spills, nuclear accidents, mountaintop removal coal
mining, and natural gas fracking to wind power projects
and solar power plants, every source of energy has costs.
Featuring the essays found in ENERGY plus additional
material, The ENERGY Reader takes an unflinching look
at the systems that support our insatiable thirst for more
power along with their unintended side effects.
Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and
Post Carbon Institute. 384 pages, 6 x 9, 7 b/w photographs, 5 line illustrations.
$19.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0970950093, Fall 2012.

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