ENERGY DENSITY

As man increased his numbers per unit area, the laws of physics demanded that he use not just more energy, but more concentrated energy; and without the benefit of planning commissions or departments of energy, history obliged. The history of energy is one of increasing energy concentration: from sun and wind to wood to coal to oil to uranium.

Sun and wind, abandoned for good reasons in the industrial revolution, provide 50 W/m^2 or less when averaged over time in moderate latitudes; uranium ore, as now used, contains 46 kWh in each pound of ore (even for a breeder-opponent who throws 99% of it away), and some 50 megawatt-hours per pound if you use your head and a breeder.

The concentration of energy in an industrial society is not subject to ideological reveries, but is dictated by simple arithmetic. In urban areas, the spatial energy consumption is about 10 watts per square meter (7.5 in Germany, 12 in India, as high as 30 W/m^2 in individual cases). Even if the world's population were suddenly to stop increasing, and even if it did not want to live better than it lives now (what absurdities we are conceding!), it could not use "soft" sources to reach such densities. The densest of them, thermal solar space heating, yields an average flux of less than 11 W/m^2, and that is only low-grade heat. The rest are worse (wind with 4 and heat pumps with 2 W/m^2 are next); there is nothing left for transportation or industry.

"Soft" technology can support a rural society with energy fluxes below 1 W/m^2. The industrial revolution had to turn to coal.

Energy density is the reason why Lovins' gospel is fundamentally flawed; the individual details of his blunders range from errors of the order of 1,000 (i.e, 100,000%) in his figures for the energy expended in manufacturing "soft" energy sources to breath-taking imbecilities like the claim that energy and capital can be saved by shutting down a nuclear plant that has already been built. Simple arithmetic precludes his utopias, no matter how wishful the thinking of his audiences.

The fact that Lovins has no earned degree (his Oxford "degree" is of a type that is handed out as a formality to keep university administrators happy) does not, in itself, speak against him, for there have been many brilliant scientists without a format degree, and to the contrary, we all know plenty of morons with Ph.D's. Yet the halftruths and innuendos with which he palms himself off as a "physicist" in his personal resume fit in well with his pseudo-scientific distortions, and above all with his dishonest masquerade as a free-marketeer as he rejoices for nuclear plants canceled or kept inactive by coercion, criminal trespass, violence and witch hunts.

[More: Spatial energy densities taken from W. Sassin, "Urbanization and the energy problem," Options, (IIASA Austria); for some details of Lovins' pseudo-theories, see Why "Soft" Technology Will Not Be America's Energy Salvation, $2 from Golem Press, Box 1342, Boulder, CO 80306; Lovins testifying under oath about his unearned degrees, see Cross-Examination of Amory Lovins during Pa. Public Utility Hearings on Economics of Limerick Generating Stations, Phila., Pa., 30 March 1981, but more damaging evidence on these points has been collected by Mark Hugo, Nebraska Voice of Energy, 852 S. 15 Ave., Omaha, NE 68105, tel. 402/346-6572.)