Frontlines

Deck: 
DC power makes a comeback in this vision of neighborhood grids and fuel cells on wheels.
Fortnightly Magazine - October 15 2000
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Frontlines

Engineers Have Their Day

 

DC power makes a comeback in this vision of neighborhood grids and fuel cells on wheels.

"The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stone. And the oil age won't end because we ran out of oil." And columnists will never run out of quotes—as long as Amory Lovins is around, railing against the conventional wisdom. These days, he's talking about a new energy industry based not on oil, but on hydrogen.

"Oil will become not worth extracting," he predicts. "Good mainly for holding up the ground."

Lovins made his mark during the late 1970s and early 1980s, with his "negawatts" campaign. He would intervene in utility rate cases, urging regulators to consider conservation as an alternative to new power plants. He called it DSM—demand-side management. To the utility executives, it was "damned stupid marketing." Why ask ratepayers to stop buying electricity?

A rising stock market and falling oil prices put the negawatt crusade out of fashion during most of the past decade, but now the pendulum has swung again. Crude is up. Natural gas is up. Lovins has returned, as eager as ever to remake the world. "A great industry," says Lovins, talking about electric utilities, "but a bad business." So I made a point to catch his latest stump speech—"The Surprises are Coming: Hypercars, Hydrogen and Distributed Utilities"—at the annual conference of the U.S. Association for Energy Economics, held last month in Philadelphia.

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