Center for Social Innovation

Published: October 08, 2007 Download  29 minutes, 13.5mb, recorded 2007-03-27

In the third and final session on Energy Efficiency in Industry, Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, discusses two case studies to demonstrate the value of the whole system optimization approach to energy efficiency. To emphasize his point, he uses the metaphor of eating an Atlantic lobster. There are the obvious opportunities in the big chunks of meat in the body and claws, he says, but there are valuable morsels hidden away in other areas that need to be discovered. The case studies concern an industrial retrofit of a plant converting liquid methane into liquefied natural gas, and the development of a new data center.

Amory B. Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute cofounder, chairman, and chief scientist, is an experimental physicist educated at Harvard and Oxford. He advises governments and major firms worldwide on advanced energy and resource efficiency, and has led the technical redesign of $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors to achieve very large energy savings at typically lower capital cost.

Resources

• Winning the Oil Endgame, by Amory Lovins
• Rocky Mountain Institute
• Natural Capitalism, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins
• Lecture series videos