New energy innovations

You’ve heard of death by a thousand cuts. Are you ready for new life by a thousand innovations? Amory Lovins’ new masterpiece, Reinventing Fire is packed full with hundreds of ideas touching every nook and cranny of our incredibly complex energy system, from the many technologies of supply and their respective fuel sources, to the many forms of demand.

Many know Amory Lovins as what Isaiah Berlin would call a hedgehog rather than a fox: a thinker with one big idea rather than a lot of little ones. In Lovins’ case, the one big idea would be conservation though efficiency, an idea he made elegantly famous by favoring “negawatts” over megawatts--energy not used over energy that is expensively lifted out of the ground. By pursuing demand side management—the “soft path”—rather than drilling for more oil or building more nuclear plants—the “hard path”—we can end our oil addiction, reduce our energy costs, and live in a safer and more secure environment.

In Reinventing Fire, Lovins and his staff at the Rocky Mountain Institute have not surrendered the soft path vision first put forth in Foreign Affairs in 1976. But now they have filled in that big, hedgehog-like idea with enough detail to satisfy the foxes. Rather than relying on one big technological breakthrough to supply cheap, clean energy—an approach that, by comparison, looks pretty hedgehoggish—Lovins and Co. rely only on well-proven, existing technologies to chart a pragmatic path from here to a much better future.

On the demand side, transportation, buildings, and industry each have their own fact-filled chapters. On the supply side, Chapter One speaks to ‘Defossilizing Fuels,’ and Chapter Five, to ‘Electricity: Repowering Prosperity.’ The concluding Chapter Six, ‘Many Choices, One Future,’ looks back from a vision of the year 2050 that pulls it all together.