Amory Lovins

Energy efficiency is traditionally viewed as a pile of separate technologies to be added in order of increasing cost. Yet designing buildings, vehicles, and factories instead as whole systems can save several-fold more energy at several-fold lower cost. Examples spanning all sectors and virtually all applications even show that such "integrative design" can often make savings cost less as their quantity grows. Countries still building much of their infrastructure can more easily build it right than fix it later, so integrative design offers an extraordinary opportunity to stretch capital budgets by leveraging enormous supply-side savings.

Physicist Amory Lovins has been an energy advisor to major firms and governments in 65+ countries for 40+ years; an author 31 books and 600 papers; and an integrative designer of superefficient buildings, factories, and vehicles. He has received the Blue Planet, Volvo, Zayed, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, the MacArthur and Ashoka Fellowships, the Happold, Benjamin Franklin, and Spencer Hutchens Medals, 12 honorary doctorates, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood (“alternative Nobel”), National Design, and World Technology awards. His recent efforts include supporting RMI’s collaborative synthesis, for China’s National Development and Reform Commission, of an ambitious efficiency and renewables trajectory to inform the 13th Five Year Plan, and exploring how to make integrative design the new normal, so investments to energy efficiency can yield expanding rather than diminishing returns.