Amory Lovins

MAP/Ming Visiting Professor for Energy and the Environment at Stanford University

Energy Efficient Design For Buildings - Part 1

Amory Lovins

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Buildings represent an ideal opportunity for reducing energy through clever design. Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, explores the many possibilities that building design offers us to "think outside of the box" in order to save energy. He illustrates his talk with numerous examples of effective design. He also highlights a few cases where smart energy design actually costs less to build, not more! From MAP.

According to Amory Lovins, the way to design energy efficient buildings involves "thinking outside the box", or simply just giving up old ways of approaching the problem.

Lovins begins his talk with examples of three buildings in three different climes (Denver, Colorado; Davis, California; Germany) that, using imaginative design, save both energy and costs. He includes stories of opportunities to apply clever design during renovation as well as in new construction. With each success story we hear about the potential gains through air conditioning, lighting and heating, and through innovative design of lamps, windows, and ducts.

Rather than entailing higher construction costs, smartly designed buildings can often actually cost less, a phenomenon Lovins refers to as "tunneling through the cost barrier". This is part one of a two-part presentation on “Energy Efficiency in Buildings”. It is also the first in a series of five talks on Energy Efficiency by Amory Lovins and is brought to you by MAP.

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Amory B. Lovins, a MacArthur Fellow and consultant physicist, has advised the energy and other industries for 34 years as well as the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense. His work in over 50 countries has been recognized by the “Alternative Nobel,” Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, the Benjamin Franklin and Happold Medals, nine honorary doctorates, honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Jean Meyer, Time Hero for the Planet, and World Technology Awards.

He advises industries and governments worldwide, and has briefed 19 heads of state. He co-founded and leads Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent, market-oriented, entrepreneurial, nonprofit, nonpartisan think-and-do tank that creates abundance by design. Much of its path-finding work on advanced resource productivity and innovative business strategies is synthesized in Natural Capitalism. More than 80 Fortune 500 firms have lately used or invited RMI’s consultancy. RMI earns most of its revenue from such programmatic enterprise, including the super-efficient e-design of $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors, and has spun off four for-profit firms (e.g., E SOURCE, www.esource.com, and Fiberforge, www.fiberforge.com). His Pentagon-cosponsored 29th book (2004), now being implemented in the private sector, is Winning the Oil Endgame.

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
  

This program is from our Energy Efficiency series.

For The Conversations Network:

• Post-production audio engineer: Sheela Sethuraman
• Website editor: Pauline McNamara
• Series producer: Sheela Sethuraman

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Winning the Oil Endgame

by Amory B. Lovins

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5

Amazon.com Customer Comment:

We can beat Peak Oil! (review by Author of When Technology Fails).
Amory Lovins, physicist, ecologist, technical innovator and founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has coauthored a clear practical blueprint for weaning America from our oil addiction while jump starting the economy and regaining our position as the world's leader in sustainable technology and innovation. Rocky Mountain Institute has been hired by numerous governments and large corporations, Wal Mart and the Department of Defense being among them, to study their systems and make recommendations for improving materials, process and energy efficiencies. If you are a person who is technically oriented and likes details, facts and figures, then this is the book for you.

Lovins, who invented the term "negawatts" and has been a pioneer in the sustainability movement, clearly shows us that we can thrive while beating peak oil if we just do the right things on a national and global scale. The choice is ours: do we make good choices and thrive, or do we choose business-as-usual, which is leading us into crash-and-burn?

Highly recommended!

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