Net Energy Metering, Zero Net Energy, and the Distributed Energy Resource Future

On behalf of PG&E, Rocky Mountain Institute organized and facilitated a roundtable of experts to evaluate the potential implications for the utility and its customers of a future business environment characterized by high levels of customer energy efficiency, growing numbers of Zero Net Energy buildings, and increased adoption of distributed generation (largely solar PV) by utility customers. The group worked to build a shared understanding of the problems and challenges facing stakeholders in the electric system and to identify the essential characteristics of workable long-term solutions.

 

Currents Spotlight on Rocky Mountain Institute

In this interview in Currents, the Navy's energy and environmental magazine, Amory Lovins shares his ideas for an enduring and resilient Department of Defense.

 

Turbocharging Efficiency Programs: Going for Broader and Deeper Savings

In Turbocharging Energy Efficiency Programs, we analyze the challenges that utilities themselves face for going broader and deeper, and then offer recommendations to increase the effectiveness of programs. These recommendations include: making marketing work, improving sales execution, driving down transaction costs, and embracing collaboration. In order to illustrate how these recommendations look in practice, we also highlight six efficiency programs run by utilities and third-party administrators.

 

Reinventing Fire Transportation Sector Methodology

This document provides RMI's methodology for the analysis of the transportation sector in Reinventing Fire.

 

Reinventing Fire Industry Sector Methodology

This document provides RMI's methodology for the analysis of the industry sector in Reinventing Fire.

 

Reinventing Fire Electricity Sector Methodology

This document provides RMI's methodology for the analysis of the electricity sector in Reinventing Fire.

 

Reply to "The Efficiency Dilemma"

In this letter published in The New Yorker, Amory Lovins responds to David Owen's article about energy efficiency and Jevons Paradox.

 

Profitable Solutions to Climate, Oil, and Proliferation

Protecting the climate is not costly but profitable (even if avoided climate change is worth zero), mainly because saving fuel costs less than buying fuel. The two biggest opportunities, both sufficiently fast, are oil and electricity. The US, for example, can eliminate its oil use by the 2040s at an average cost of $15 per barrel (2000$), half by redoubled efficiency and half by alternative supplies, and can save three-fourths of its electricity more cheaply than operating a thermal power station. Integrative design permits this by making big energy savings cheaper than small ones, turning traditionally assumed diminishing returns into empirically observed expanding returns. Such efficiency choices accelerate climate-safe, inexhaustible, and resilient energy supply—notably the ‘‘micropower’’ now delivering about a sixth of the world’s electricity and 90% of its new electricity. These cheap, fast, market-financeable, globally applicable options offer the most effective, yet most underestimated and overlooked, solutions for climate, proliferation, and poverty.

 

Factor Ten Engineering Design Principles

Designers often assume that radical efficiency is too expensive. Yet RMI’s Factor Ten Engineering initiative demonstrates that very large energy and resource savings can be very profitable across a wide range of applications. Factor Ten Engineering uses such innovations to transform design and engineering practice, via whole-system thinking and integrative design. This document outlines the design principles of Factor Ten Engineering.

 

Integrative Design: A Disruptive Source of Expanding Returns to Investments in Energy Efficiency

This paper summarizes the principle of integrative design. Integrative design rigorously applies orthodox engineering principles, but achieves radically more energy- and resource-efficient results by asking different questions that change the design logic. Examples described in this paper for buildings, industry, and vehicles show that optimizing whole systems for multiple benefits, not disjunct components for single benefits, often makes gains in end- use efficiency much bigger and cheaper than conventionally supposed. Indeed, integrative design can often yield expanding rather than the normal diminishing returns to investments in energy efficiency, making very large (even order-of-magnitude) energy savings cost less than small or no savings.

 

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