Renewable Revolution

JD,
I hear ya about Clinton. On the subject of efficient heating and cooling of buildings, notice in the White House video the office building behind it. Amory Lovins discovered that they had put in about 240 window air conditioners in the 1950s and screwed up the design the architect had put into the building about 100 years ago or so that eliminated the need for most cooling because of a clever window vent design (that the wall air conditioners totally screwed up!  ).

The architects of old knew all about renewable energy in building design before fossil fuels. Amory Lovins goes all over the world teaching people how to cut 80 to 90 percent energy use without ANY loss in comfort or manufacturing capacity AND most of the time an actual increase in air quality because of superior circulation prevents disease germs (from someone who came to work sick) from being spread. Our industrial engineers and fossil fuel happy architects have truly forked a lot of things up. The key, known by architects of old and forgotten today but rediscovered by Amory Lovins and his team of engineers, is that you extract hot air from the TOP of a floor, not the middle or bottom and you MUST avoid mixing the old air with the new by introducing the new air at the lowest point on the floor area. The way most systems are designed now, the fans and ducting push germs (yep, hospitals too! Amory has done a lot of refits on hospitals that have saved them a bundle on energy -> MUCH SMALLER FANS, Pumps  and less curves in ducting and pipes carrying fluids AND made the air circulation better able to prevent the spread of germs) around and use multiples as much energy because the fans are working against the natural gradient. In Amory Lovins building refits, the hot, old air or hot ANYTHING from industrial processes is run through a heat exchanger (not just ANY heat exchanger - these are new designs massively more efficient at sucking heat out of air or liquid flows with low or NO FOSSIL FUELS, thank you very much) BEFORE IT IS EXHAUSTED so there is little or no waste heat and you get energy to heat water or increase air pressure in an evaporative cycle for air conditioning OR heating WITHOUT the use of a fossil fuel powered compressor. It's all in those five videos I posted on Energy Efficiency by Amory Lovins.

This is not Cornucopian stuff. The WASTE is MASSIVE. We ARE talking about 80 to 90% of civilization unnecessarily using power, PERIOD. We ACTUALLY need to spend only 10 or 20% of the energy we NOW SPEND to do exactly the same things IF we become efficient as we were before fossil fuels but with better technology. Amory points out that MOST of the energy spent in civilization is NOT in transportation, mining or industrial processes manufacturing stuff like is commonly believed ; MOST of the energy, and most is WASTED because of poor design and understanding of laminar versus turbulent flow of liquids, is to power PUMPS. That's right; PUMPS! (Second video - energy efficiency in buildings).

Don't believe me? Watch the videos. They are long. They are boring but they are fastidiously accurate. Amory Lovins has done refits all over the world from the Empire State Building to the White House to Computer Chip Factories to whatever. The guy KNOWS what he is talking about and has been DOING it, not just talking about it, since the 1980s. 


Check him out. The guy is extremely down to earth, is not prone to hyperbole or wishful/magical  thinking and PROVES, with data, ALL HIS CLAIMS.