Asia’s Accelerating Energy Revolution
Asias Accelerating Energy Revolution
Amory B. Lovins
March 26, 2013
Largely unnoticed in the West, Asias energy revolution is gathering speed. Its driven by the same economic and strategic logic that Reinventing Fire showed could profitably shift the United States from fossil-fuel-based and nuclear energy to three-times-more-efficient use and three-fourths renewables by 2050.
Renewable energy now provides one-fifth of the worlds electricity and has added about half of the worlds new generating capacity each year since 2008. Excluding big hydro dams, renewables got $250 billion in private investment in 2011 alone, adding 84 GW, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance and ren21.net. The results were similar in 2012.
While RMI explores how key partners could apply our U.S. synthesis to other countries, including China, revolutionary shiftsstrikingly parallel to our approachare already emerging in the three biggest Asian economies: Japan, China, and India. They add strong reasons to expect the already-underway renewable revolution to scale even further and faster.
Japan Awakens
After world-leading energy efficiency gains in the 1970s, Japans energy kaizen stagnated. Japanese industry remains among the most efficient of 11 major industrial nations, but Japan now ranks tenth among them in industrial cogeneration and commercial building efficiency, eighth in truck efficiency, and ties with the U.S. for next-to-last in car efficiency. With such low efficiencies and very high energy pricesfar higher for electricity than in a more competitive market structure, while gas prices are historically linked to oil pricesfixing these inefficiencies can be stunningly profitable. For example, retrofitting semiconductor company Rohms Japan head office in front of the Kyoto railway stationeven without using superwindows as RMI did in the Empire State Building retrofitsaved even more energy (44 percent) with a faster payback (two years).
As the debate triggered by the Fukushima disaster opens up a profound public energy conversation, Japan is ...
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