Amory Lovins
It sure can be a small world in the energy field.
My previous post was about hearing Dennis Lee talk about Lyman Lemnitzer, and how I was already familiar with him. It was not the only surprising name that came up in our conversations. Another was Amory Lovins. I first heard of Lovins a long time ago, maybe about his hypercar, which was a pale reflection of my mentor’s engine. A generation ago, I either heard Brian O’Leary talk about it or I read about it. It was during Brian’s ride as the Paul Revere of Free Energy. Brian encountered Lovins when they were both on the same flight. Brian knew Lovins from encounters at conferences and the like. At baggage claim, Brian asked Lovins what he thought about free energy. Lovins nearly soiled himself and quickly fled.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis (which I saw coming), I began reading a lot of financial analysis, and began regularly reading the work of quite a few financial bloggers. The better ones understood the relationship of energy and economy, and several years ago, I decided to contact several of those bloggers on the free-energy issue. The only significant response was to direct me toward Richard Heinberg, who held court at an organization very similar to one that Lovins heads. Heinberg was not as bad as Lovins, but his interest in free energy was feigned, as he beat the drums of doom.
My views on Heinberg and Lovins have never been too conspiratorial, as I largely saw them as boxed-in intellectuals, trapped by their ideologies, and they had classic instances of what I call Level 3 awareness of the free energy issue, where mainstream “experts” usually reside. I recently wrote a series of posts on reviving Dennis’s heat pump in North America, and I got into the technicalities to a degree, such as the physics and performance data. I have covered his effort in Seattle for many years, and I have made Substack posts on it. It is still the greatest attempt ever made to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace that I know of, and it was the first time that the global elite undeniably took notice of Dennis. During our recent conversations, Lovins’s name came up.
As I have written at length and discussed it in my recent interview, that because of the biggest municipal-bond default in American history to that time, because of an ill-advised attempt to build nuclear power plants, there was suddenly a market for the world’s best heating system in Dennis’s home state. Because it once had the cheapest electricity in the world because of all of its hydroelectric projects, Washington hosted energy-intensive industries and many thousands of Washington households heated their homes with electricity. Jimmy Carter’s tax credit was about to expire at the end of 1985, and Dennis saw one last chance to make it happen and build an industry around that heat pump. Washington’s electric companies were promoting air-to-air heat pumps that would save 50% of the electricity used in electric resistance heating. Dennis’s heat pump saved 85% over electric resistance heating.
Dennis saw the full-page ads from the electric companies about saving electricity. Dennis figured that if the electric companies were promoting 50%-savings technology, they should be ecstatic about 85% savings. Dennis thought that the electric companies would throw him a tickertape parade. What Dennis had yet to learn was that he had stumbled into a scam of the public by the electric companies. If a customer with electric heating got a heat pump (which the electric company’s subsidized by raising everybody’s rates), their electric consumption for heating would decline by 50%, but it would prevent them from changing to a gas furnace and losing 100%. This was a scam that Dennis stumbled into, he inadvertently threatened to ruin the game, and this is where Lovins comes in. Just as the electric companies began wiping out Dennis’s company, Lovins popularized the idea of what he called good load and bad load. Lovins writes a lot about electric-grid loads, as you can see here.
Dennis told me that Lovins provided the rationale for why his company needed to be wiped out, as 50% savings with using air-to-air heat pumps was “good load,” but 85% savings with Dennis’s heat pump was “bad load.” I don’t know the particulars of what Lovins did, and if he did it at the prompting of the electric companies, then he was the intellectual equivalent of Bill Delp. Maybe it was just another coincidence.
Anyway, it sure was interesting to hear Lovins’s name come up.