Amory Lovins Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

The markets make a good servant but a bad master, and a worse religion

Amory Lovins
A widely heralded view holds that nuclear power is experiencing a dramatic worldwide revival and vibrant growth, because it's competitive, necessary, reliable, secure, and vital for fuel security and climate protection. That's all false. In fact, nuclear power is continuing its decades-long collapse in the global marketplace because it's grossly uncompetitive, unneeded, and obsolete—so hopelessly uneconomic that one needn't debate whether it's clean and safe; it weakens electric reliability and national security; and it worsens climate change compared with devoting the same money and time to more effective options.

Amory Lovins
Our energy future is choice, not fate. Oil dependence is a problem we need no longer have-and it's cheaper not to. U.S. oil dependence can be eliminated by proven and attractive technologies that create wealth, enhance choice, and strengthen common security.

Amory Lovins
If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.

Amory Lovins
When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say that we have exactly enough time — starting now

Amory Lovins
Variable but forecastable renewables (wind and solar cells) are very reliable when integrated with each other, existing supplies and demand. For example, three German states were more than 30 percent wind-powered in 2007—and more than 100 percent in some months. Mostly renewable power generally needs less backup than utilities already bought to combat big coal and nuclear plants' intermittence.

Amory Lovins
...new nuclear plants are simply unfinanceable in the private capital market, and the technology will continue to die of an incurable attack of market forces—all the faster in competitive markets. This is true not just in the U.S., where the last order was in 1978 and all orders since 1973 were cancelled, but globally.

Amory Lovins
By skimping on design, the owner gets costlier equipment, higher energy costs, and a less competitive and comfortable building; the tenants get lower productivity and higher rent and operating costs.

Amory Lovins
Many analysts now regard modest, zero, or negative growth in our rate of energy use as a realistic long-term goal.

Amory Lovins
Facts are more mundane than fantasies, but a better basis for conclusions.

Amory Lovins
There are two kinds of micropower. One is co-gen and combined heat and power. That was about two-thirds of the new capacity and three-quarters of the new electricity last year. The rest was distributed or decentralized renewables, which was a $38 billion U.S. global market last year for selling equipment. That's wind, solar, geothermal, small hydro and biomass.... Micropower surpassed nuclear power in worldwide installed capacity in 2002, and surpassed nuclear in electricity generated per year just in the last few months.

Amory Lovins