Soft Energy Path - Implementation

Implementation

See also: Renewable energy commercialization

Lovins recognised that major energy decisions are always implemented gradually and incrementally, and that major shifts take decades. A chief element of the soft path strategy is to avoid major commitments to inflexible infrastructure that locks us into particular supply patterns for decades.

The following transitional strategy to a soft energy path has been proposed:

• Double the efficiency of oil utilization, mainly through improved vehicle design (the development of improved hybrid cars, ultralight designs, and streamlined large transport vehicles).

• Apply creative business models which focus on certain advanced technologies and lightweight materials.

• Substitute 25% of U.S. oil needs via a major domestic biofuels industry, which could result in an economic boost for the rural regions that would supply the plant material for biofuels.

• Make natural gas again abundant and affordable through wider utilization of well-established efficiency techniques.

Lovins argues that the barriers to soft energy paths are not technical, nor in any fundamental sense economic. He suggests that barriers are mainly institutional, and relate to obsolete building codes, an innovation-resistant building industry, promotional utility rate structures, inapproriate tax and mortgage policies, imperfect access to capital markets and fragmentation of government responsibilities.

Lovins wrote in 1977 that "a largely or wholly solar economy can be constructed in the United States with straightforward soft technologies that are now demonstrated and now economic or nearly economic".