On August 5, 2014, Amory Lovins published a commentary on Forbes.com titled Sowing Confusion About Renewable Energy. He was responding to an opinion piece published in the July 26, 2014 issue of The Economist that was based on a working paper titled The Net Benefits of Low and No-Carbon Electricity Technologies written by Charles R. Frank of the Brookings Institute.

Lovins so strongly rejected the conclusions of that paper that he wrote a 12-page critique of the paper that is available on this page of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI) web site. Here is a statement from Frank’s paper abstract that explains why it drew Lovins’s ire:

First–assuming reductions in carbon emissions are valued at $50 per metric ton and the price of natural gas is $16 per million Btu or less–nuclear, hydro, and natural gas combined cycle have far more net benefits than either wind or solar. This is the case because solar and wind facilities suffer from a very high capacity cost per megawatt, very low capacity factors and low reliability, which result in low avoided emissions and low avoided energy cost per dollar invested.

Lovins ridiculed Dr. Frank’s conclusions and the editorial decision by The Economist to publish its article about them as follows:

As soon as The Economist featured his paper, their inboxes and Twitter feeds lit up with incredulity: could his conclusions possibly be true? They’re not (and yes, I’ve written The Economist a letter saying so). My detailed critique at www.rmi.org/frank_rebuttal explains why, and cites two other reviews and a podcast. But for anyone who knows the subject, Dr. Frank’s con­clu­sions don’t even pass the giggle test.

…

The diligent Dr. Frank has collected not just one wrong number but a flotilla, together driving a false conclusion that gained a prominent platform in The Econo­mist. The ana­lytic lesson: rapidly changing data quickly pass their sell-by date.

Lovins describes how he and members of his staff at RMI performed a new analysis using different input numbers that supposedly reflected more modern performance and cost numbers and came to their own conclusion.

Presto! The conclusions flipped. Instead of gas combined-cycle and nuclear plants’ offering the greatest net benefit from displacing coal plants, followed by hydro, wind, and last of all solar, the ranks reversed. The new, correct, story: first hydro (on his purely economic assumptions) and gas (only if we omit its price volatility), then wind, solar, and last of all nuclear—still omitting efficiency, which beats them all.

Though this piece is not going to be a point by point answer of the Lovins’s/RMI rebuttal of Frank’s paper, there is a particular section in that work that may help to illustrate the habit that Amory Lovins has for making statements that can be misinterpreted as indicating that he is erring on the conservative side by providing underestimates of the performance of unreliable energy collection systems like wind.

It would have been simpler and far more accurate to use modern data. The missing table is in the latest (30 July 2014) online EIA data, which for 2008–13 show 31.0% average wind capacity factor (and for the first five months of 2014, 38.2%);

An uncritical reader might think that wind performance is on a rapid rise with that substantial uptick in the most recently available data set, but people who pay careful attention to weather patterns might recall that the first five months of any year (late winter and spring months) will generally be windier than the next four months of June, July, August and September.

In the comment section following the article, Amory Lovins and I have engaged in a back and forth that I’d like to preserve in an area where I have editorial control. You may or may not find it interesting. I’ve tried to organize the comments together in conversations separated by solid lines.



From Rod Adams

10:55pm on 08/06/14

@Amory B. Lovins:

Of your 520 publications about energy, can you provide an estimate of the portion that have been peer reviewed?

I wonder how many of the institutions where you have taught are aware that their visiting lecturer was a two-time college dropout without any earned degrees indicating completion of an accredited course of study?

I’m still mystified by a large portion of your math and thermodynamics assumptions.

From Amory Lovins:

8/8/2014

This responds to Rod Adams’s 2255 6 August 2014 post, as he has lately made several posts here.

(Background for other readers: Mr. Rod Adams publishes Atomic Insights (atomicinsights.com), which carries his and others’ prolific pro-nuclear-power advocacy in a variety of media, including his podcasts on The Atomic Show. His background (http://atomicinsightscom.c.presscdn.com/wp-content/uploads/Rod-Adams-resume-Atomic-Insights-April-20141.pdf) is in the Nuclear Navy (an excellent culture from which my organization has hired several engineers), including three years as an Engineer Officer on a nuclear submarine; an established and a startup venture in small modular reactors; and 18 years of professional nuclear advocacy, which continues. His degrees are in English and Systems Technology with a Diploma in National Policy and Strategy. Having not done well questioning my work’s facts and logic, he continues here a longstanding line of questioning my qualifications and the accuracy of my résumé (e.g. http://atomicinsights.com/amory-lovinss-academic-career/). He seems annoyed that I publish analyses and opinions on nuclear power without being a nuclear engineer (although I did publish a prescient article in Nuclear Engineering International). I am not annoyed that he publishes opinions about energy efficiency and renewable energy. I just expect of him the same care, rigor, and respect that he expects of me. So far my expectations have not been fulfilled. However, in an episode last year, Mr. Adams behaved with the integrity one expects of a Naval Academy graduate: after vigorously challenging one of my facts in a public forum, he researched it, found he was wrong and I was right, and forthrightly said so in his own blog (http://atomicinsights.com/owe-amory-lovins-apology/#comments) and in a note to me. In that spirit, I therefore address both his questions here in the hope he will find something better to do.)

“Of your 520 publications about energy, can you provide an estimate of the portion that have been peer reviewed?” I actually stated that probably 90+% of my ~520 publications are about energy, not all of them. Of my 326 technical publications (the rest are popular), ~314, spanning many disciplines and topics, were related to energy. Of those ~314, at least 44 appeared in peer-reviewed journals or proceedings (ranging from Nature, Science, Intl J Veh Design, Ann Rev En, and J Chem Phys to El J, En J, En Pol, AIP Procs, ASHRAE J, and SAE), 8 in professional periodicals whose peer-review status I cannot readily determine, and at least 4 in noted journals that peer-reviewed most or all of my papers even though that’s not their usual practice. Some of the publications in peer-reviewed journals were articles, while some others were letters that may have received only editorial review. In addition, many of my other publications received rigorous peer review internally and often externally, as is RMI’s normal policy. My usual internal peer reviewers are Managing Directors and Principals at Rocky Mountain Institute, whose qualifications are at www.rmi.org/Staff. An example of external peer review is the the list on pp 253-254 of my 2011 book with 60 colleagues, Reinventing Fire (www.rmi.org/reinventingfire). I have found peer review a very beneficial practice, and think Mr. Adams would too.

“I wonder how many of the institutions where you have taught are aware that their visiting lecturer was a two-time college dropout without any earned degrees indicating completion of an accredited course of study?” Almost certainly all ten of them, as their appointment processes (like the selection processes for my various awards) are generally quite rigorous. My status as a Harvard and Oxford dropout with only honorary doctorates (currently 12) and an Oxford MA by Special Resolution (by virtue of being a don) should not surprise anyone, as it’s explicit in many of my shorter biographies (e.g. http://www.aeecenter.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageID=4200, http://www.tedxrainier.com/speakers/amory-lovins/, http://www.futureinreview.com/topics/leaders/amory-lovins/) and has been stated in detail in my long-form bios for probably 20+ years (current examples include http://www.rmi.org/Content/Files/Staff_BioABLEnerCarSecCorp25vii09.pdf, www.rmi.org/Content/Files/Staff_BioABLEnerCarSecCorp25vii09.pdf, and www.rmi.org/Content/Files/Acorpbio_5v13r.pdf). By the way, I held a visiting professorial (not lecturer) title at six of those institutions — one of them currently, as Professor of Practice at the Naval Postgraduate School — and at all ten, taught subjects I hadn’t formally studied, but that didn’t seem to bother them.

May we please return now to the substantive topics under discussion?

From Rod Adams

11:36am on 08/09/14

@Amory Lovins

I am not “annoyed that I publish analyses and opinions on nuclear power without being a nuclear engineer (although I did publish a prescient article in Nuclear Engineering International).”

I am annoyed and insulted by the fact that you have been making and publishing statements like the following samples for the past 40 years:

1977 Mother Earth News – “If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”

2008 Democracy Now “What nuclear would do is displace coal, our most abundant domestic fuel. And this sounds good for climate, but actually, expanding nuclear makes climate change worse, for a very simple reason. Nuclear is incredibly expensive.” (You modestly don’t bother to take credit for your own contributions to that expense.)

2008 Mother Jones: “Nuclear added less capacity than photovoltaics and a 10th of what wind power added. Even in China, which has ambitious nuclear goals, they already have seven times as much distributed renewable as nuclear capacity, and it’s growing seven times faster.

MJ: Then I suppose you consider nuclear the most overhyped energy source?

AL: Clearly. It’s unable to find private investment despite federal subsidies now approaching or even exceeding its total costs.” (Focusing on capacity or the recent dearth of new nuclear plant completions overlooks many aspects of reliable power generation.)

2011, Huffington Post “Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving: as Swedish Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén said, “No acts of God can be permitted.” Fallible people have created its half-century history of a few calamities, a steady stream of worrying incidents, and many near-misses. ” (Have you ever read the extensive analysis done as part of the NRC’s State of the Art Reactor Consequences Analysis (SOARCA)? The consequences of even the worst case event that can realistically occur are “few, if any deaths.” The technology is forgiving; the lack of measurable human health effects from Fukushima supports that contention.)

It would be hypocritical of me to claim that your lack of a nuclear engineering degree makes you unqualified to comment on nuclear energy. I also don’t have a degree in nuclear engineering.

However, I do have a modest amount of practical experience in supplying critical energy to demanding customers. There is a major difference between systems that can be controlled by humans or by engineered control systems and those that have to wait for the weather to change in order to change their output.

I am also a conservationist in the classical sense of John Muir or Ansel Adams; I like open spaces, unspoiled deserts, and unoccupied mountain tops. Collection systems designed to capture weather dependent, diffuse energy are, by necessity far larger than those that use concentrated energy sources like burning hydrocarbons or fissioning actinides.

The places where the sun shines most reliably or the wind blows hardest are often special habitats and quite a long ways from places where humans society has chosen to concentrate. Large collectors of unreliable energy and lengthy transmission systems are not economic; you have to use creative math to make the claim that they are.

Rod Adams

Publisher, Atomic Insights

From Rod Adams

5:33pm on 08/07/14

No one ignores the conservation or energy efficiency options, especially those who operate large enterprises that consume vast quantities of energy. One of my beefs with Lovins’s qualifications is that he apparently believes that energy professionals are taking refuge in the laws of thermodynamics instead of realizing that we simply understand how they limit the efficiency of heat engines.

We work hard to extract as much useful energy as practicable, but know that the absolutely highest conversion efficiency is about 60% and that requires a complex and expensive system with numerous reheaters, two stages of heat extraction, and a sophisticated control system. Those machines could never fit inside a personal automobile, so we have to use Otto or Diesel cycles that are less efficient.

They are compact, low cost, and effective power devices, however, that provide a great deal of personal liberty, even to people with modest means.

Lovins has also been virulently opposed to the use of nuclear energy since he became a campaigner for Friends of the Earth in the UK, instead of working on his energy studies that might have helped him realize that the rest of us were not stupid or short sighted.

One of the qualifications that Lovins rarely lists on his brag sheet on RMI’s web site is a statement that he let slip during an interview on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now on July 16, 2008 in a segment titled “Amory Lovins: Expanding Nuclear Power Makes Climate Change Worse.”

“You know, I’ve worked for major oil companies for about thirty-five years, and they understand how expensive it is to drill for oil. ”

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/16/amory_lovins_expanding_nuclear_power_makes

It might be impolite of me, but I believe that phrase explains why Lovins has been fighting nuclear energy, a major energy competitors to oil and gas, for more than 40 years.

Rod Adams

Publisher, Atomic Insights

From Rod Adams

8:06am on 08/08/14

@Alpha2Actual

Lovins did not explain WHY oil and gas companies have hired him or helped his non-profit organization achieve the capability to pay him $750,000 per year (see RMI’s 2012 IRS form 990 at http://www.rmi.org/Content/Files/FY%202013%20990%20ending%20063013%20PDC.pdf).

I don’t think Lovins’s employment or high level of compensation have anything to do with his ability to perform useful modeling or to provide realistic energy system design suggestions. I believe it has a lot more to do with the service he provides in discouraging the use of the most formidable long term competition that his employers face.

An interesting side note is the fact that RMI reports that it employs 80 people (including interns and fellows) on an annual tax free revenue of $13 million. Lovins’s salary and other compensation thus represents more than 5% of his organization’s revenue in salary.

It is not clear if RMI is his only source of compensation.

From Amory Lovins

My salary is a modest fraction of the figure you report, which was mostly a catchup payment for a retirement plan. Page 28 of the 2012 Form 990 you cite explains this. RMI sets compensation based on a rigorous arms-length consultancy process described on pp 33-34.

RMI meets Charity Navigator’s highest standard of transparency. This includes meeting and exceeding all requirements for disclosure of its funding sources. The Institute does have some significant donors who require privacy, and we respect their wishes. However, I can assure Mr. Adams that they are not hydrocarbon companies, nor have such firms at any time given RMI significant donations. (Around 2000-02, the Shell Foundation supported the publication of our Economist book of the year *Small Is Profitable*, smallisprofitable.org; as I recall, that grant was far less than one-thousandth of RMI’s cumulative revenue, and fell far short of covering the costs of preparing that massive work on distributed benefits in electrical systems.) Over its 32 years, as part of the programmatic enterprise that earned ~43% of its cumulative revenue through FY2013, RMI has conducted technical (chiefly operational-energy-efficiency) and strategic consultancy for about a half-dozen oil companies, chiefly Shell, among >100 other major firms in ~30 sectors. Those services advanced RMI’s charitable mission and provided a tiny fraction of its total income. All those clients engaged RMI to obtain advice of business value, whether their business was oil, gas, electricity (including many leading nuclear and coal-fired utilities), or dozens of non-energy sectors.

RMI has, and I personally have, a well deserved and jealously guarded reputation for independence. I am unaware of any shred of evidence to the contrary.

From Rod Adams

@Amory Lovins

Your 2012 total compensation was, indeed a multiple of your previous years, but your previous years were not exactly a “modest fraction” of the $750,000 reported in the RMI IRS document filing that I reported. As you say, RMI meets the transparency requirements and hosts copies of its previous years 990s. I will report those numbers and let readers judge for themselves the accuracy of your statement “My salary is a modest fraction of the figure you report, which was mostly a catchup payment for a retirement plan.”

2006 Lovins Compensation for Program services $118,000, Management and General $27,000

2007 Lovins Compensation for Program services $807,000, Management and General $107,000

2008 Lovins Base compensation $247,000 plus bonus and incentive payment of $780,000

2009 Lovins compensation W-2/1099 $340,000, other compensation $10,900

2010 Lovins compensation W-2/1099 $366,000, other compensation $10,000

2011 Lovins compensation W-2/1099 $354,000, other compensation $10,000

2012 Lovins breakdown of W-2/1099 compensation Base: $246,000, Bonus $100,000, other reportable $380,000. Retirement and other deferred compensation – $13,000. Non-taxable benefits $10,000

As a former commissioned naval officer, I have an intimate knowledge of the salary and bonus tables for members of the armed services. Your compensation may have been set based on a rigorous arms-length consultancy process, but the end result of that process is that your reward for running a tax-exempt non-profit organization with annual total revenues that have varied between $7-$15 million and a total employee head count of less than 100 has been a compensation package that substantially exceeds that of a four star admiral or general.

I think that is significant, especially the part about your organization being one that depends on tax-exempt contributions and pays no taxes of its own. Apparently producing large quantities of antinuclear energy information is a well rewarded profession.

Rod Adams

Publisher, Atomic Insights

Update added 11:37 8/10/2014 (continuation of discussion on Forbes)

From Rod Adams

1458 09Aug14

@Amory Lovins

Once again, I owe you an apology. I just read the RMI IRS 990 for 2008 more thoroughly. It includes a note indicating that the $780,000 bonus reported in 2008 was reported in both 2007 (as part of the $807,000 compensation for program services) and in 2008 due to a change in reporting rules.

From Amory Lovins

8/9/2014

Thank you. FYI, this single but twice-reported payment was the first of two installments of the one-time pension catchup payment, not part of my regular compensation. The second installment (plus its accrued interest) was paid in 2012 as you previously noted. And by the way, your comparison with Flag officers’ salaries is invalid because of the very extensive nonsalary benefits that they receive but I do not.

May we again return to the subject under discussion?

8/9/2014

Noticing that you’ve reposted portions of this thread on your own site http://atomicinsights.com/amory-lovins-continues-sowing-confusion-renewable-nuclear-energy/#more-14216, “in an area where [you] have editorial control,” I hope you will also repost there your 1458 09Aug14 correction/apology and my reply to it. Thank you.

From Rod Adams (In keeping with Lovins’s request to return to the subject under discussion at the Forbes.com site – Sowing Confusion About Renewable and Nuclear Energy — I am not posting this reply in that thread. Since the topic here is a little bit different, I will respond.)

“And by the way, your comparison with Flag officers’ salaries is invalid because of the very extensive nonsalary benefits that they receive but I do not.”

There are numerous sites on the Internet that are specifically designed to help military service people compare their total compensation, including nonsalary benefits packages, with those available in the civilian world. Those sites often offer calculators that can use real numbers to provide a direct comparison, so I picked one — GIJobs.com — and entered the data for a Navy four star (O-10) who is submarine qualified, has 2 dependents, and is receiving housing subsidies in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Here is a link to the full printout, but the bottom line is that the civilian equivalent to that Admiral’s pay is $311,000. To refresh memories, here is my exact quote about Lovins’s compensation

As a former commissioned naval officer, I have an intimate knowledge of the salary and bonus tables for members of the armed services. Your compensation may have been set based on a rigorous arms-length consultancy process, but the end result of that process is that your reward for running a tax-exempt non-profit organization with annual total revenues that have varied between $7-$15 million and a total employee head count of less than 100 has been a compensation package that substantially exceeds that of a four star admiral or general.

Also by way of memory refreshment, Amory Lovins reported W-2/1099 income in 2012 excluding the one time payment was $346,000 plus $23,000 in retirement, deferred compensation and non-taxable benefits. I think that qualifies as substantially exceeding the $311,000 civilian equivalent to a four star flag officer.

End 8/10/2014 Update.

From Amory B. Lovins

08/08/2014

Burning oil produces <1% of US and <5% of world electricity, and shrinking. Most of that oil is “resid” (the tarry bottom of the barrel) that has little better use, or is burned in islands like Hawai’i or isolated Caribbean and Pacific island nations, many of which are now switching to their abundant renewable resources. Nowhere in the world can I think of an instance where continuing to burn oil OR replacing it — or any other fuel — with new nuclear generation has a business case. I know this is not what Mr. Adams wants to hear, but it’s what the empirical data show. RMI and I are data-driven analysts. Our Reinventing Fire analysis shows how to displace all U.S. oil use at an average cost around $25/bbl. Naturally such competition interests those who own oil. Having unusual knowledge of most things related to energy, we at RMI offer the best strategic advice we can to both fossil-fuel and nuclear companies (as well as scores of electric utilities) on how to use their skills, capabilities, and assets differently so they too can thrive in the energy system’s transformation to efficiency and renewables. This seems to us an important and socially valuable function. We make no apology for its requirement that we understand those industries’ needs and challenges broadly and deeply — especially their economics. That may be why the U.S. Secretary of Energy appointed and reappointed me to the National Petroleum Council that advises him. And now a note from your moderator: This brings to an end a rather unedifying exchange with Mr. Adams. Many comments lately posted on this article by various parties have little to do with its content. Some veer toward ad hominem. Readers’, and my, patience with such off-topic or off-tone comments is not unlimited. If they persist, I may feel it is in the interest of Forbes readers to block posts (or posters) inconsistent with the site’s guidelines as to relevance, substantiveness, and courtesy. Many energy sites are infested with shrill, rude, and off-point yammering. This site will not be one of those. I intend to reserve it for those seeking a substantive, informative, grounded, and respectful conversation from which we can all learn and grow. From Rod Adams

11:01am on 08/09/14

@Amory Lovins

“Nowhere in the world can I think of an instance where continuing to burn oil OR replacing it — or any other fuel — with new nuclear generation has a business case.”

The hard-headed energy supply experts in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia (among others) would disagree with your statement. Both countries currently burn oil – often distillate diesel fuel – to produce both electricity and heat for desalination systems. They have determined that is a short-sighted and uneconomic use of their large, but limited endowments of that fuel. The UAE is in the process of building four large nuclear plants supplied by the South Koreans in order to supply domestic electricity and heat so that they will have more oil and gas available to export at world prices. Saudi Arabia is in serious investigation and negotiation for an even larger nuclear program.

Iran, despite all propaganda to the contrary, has already begun operating a domestic nuclear plant to displace some of its domestic consumption of oil for electricity production and is working hard to develop a much larger capacity.

In the US in the mid to late 1970s, when you started writing articles proclaiming that nuclear energy was dead, more than 17% of our electricity using about 1.4 million barrels per day came from burning oil. At the time, nuclear generation was about 30% of what it is today. As you noted, we do not use much oil in power generation any more.

However, there are disturbing trends that are often overlooked. The Northeast US supplied about 25% of its winter 2013-2014 electricity demand by burning diesel and jet fuel in combustion gas turbines and diesel engines. They did that because they are now so dependent on natural gas after shutting down Millstone 1, Maine Yankee, Yankee Rowe, that the supply into the region cannot keep up during periods when people are also burning gas for heat. The ISO provided about $75 million in incentives to companies that own generators with dual fuel capability to increase their on-site storage of distillate fuel.

It was a good thing that they did that; the polar vortex strained supplies and almost resulted in power outages on the coldest days.

That situation may get worse when Vermont Yankee and the Brayton coal fired power station are shut down due to actions by people who believe — because they have been taught by people like you — that solar and wind energy is appropriate for New England.

That is a dangerous belief.

One more thing – my accusation was that your actions have been influenced by support from oil companies. You responded by implying that oil and nuclear energy do not compete.

That ignores the well known fact that oil companies are also major suppliers of natural gas, a fuel that is most certainly in direct competition with nuclear energy. The market price of that fuel is even more volatile and dependent on the balance between supply and demand than the price of oil.

For both fuels, the cost of extraction does not vary nearly as rapidly as the market price for the fuel, so profits are very dependent on the ability of suppliers to control the overall supply.

Rod Adams

Publisher, Atomic Insights