Amory Lovins Interview by Renewable Energy World at ASES Conference

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/video/player?bcpid=6801356001&bctid=88237775001

The opening plenary session of the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) conference this year in Phoenix featured Amory Lovins with the Rocky Mountain Institute. If you were unable to attend this year, you can at least taste a flavor of the conference by watching some selected video interviews conducted by Renewable Energy World during the conference.

Personally, I met Amory Lovins on October 3, 1977 when he gave a public lecture at the Ethical Society in Clayton, MO which is a suburb of St. Louis that is also my hometown. At the time, I was the Executive Director of a group called the Coalition for the Environment based in St. Louis who sponsored the Lovins presentation.

Lovins had published a 10,000-word essay "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" in Foreign Affairs, in October 1976.  Therefore, I met Lovins one year after that essay was published.

My favorite quote from this essay is as follows:

"Plainly we are using premium fuels and electricity for many tasks for which their high energy quality is superfluous, wasteful and expensive, and a hard path would make this inelegant practice even more common. Where we want only to create temperature differences of tens of degrees, we should meet the need with sources whose potential is tens or hundreds of degrees, not with a flame temperature of thousands or a nuclear temperature of millions-like cutting butter with a chainsaw."
 
Although my path would cross many times later with Lovins, this initial exposure to Lovins had a profound impact on me and my outlook on energy policy.

Tell us when you discovered Amory Lovins.