Predicting Savings:
By 2005 we could use only 3 percent as much electricity

Lovins is famous for his command of facts and numbers, which seem to prove that amazingly cheap conservation is possible. But, a close look at his numbers in “Four Revolutions” reveals that the individual claims not only sound amazing, but are in fact completely unbelievable, as confirmed by history. (Warning, math ahead.)

First claim: The levelized cost of that quadrupled end-use efficiency averages about 0.6 cents/kWh.

“That quadrupled end-use efficiency” refers to the entire electricity sector, which Lovins says could have used four times less electricity in 1990. In 1990, the cost of electricity was 6.6 cents/kWh, so saving electricity for only 0.6 cents/kWh is eleven times cheaper than buying it.

Second claim: We now can save approximately twice as much electricity as we could five years ago, but at only a third of the real cost. That is about a six-fold gain in cost-effective potential in five years, and nearly a 30-fold gain during the past 10 years. I see no signs of this slowing down.

Here Lovins tells us how fast things are getting better. Every five years we can save “twice as much” electricity as before, and he sees “no signs of this slowing.” So his original “quadrupled” efficiency, a 4-fold gain in 1990, doubles to become an 8-fold gain in 1995, then doubles to a 16-fold gain in 2000, and finally becomes a 32-fold efficiency gain in 2005.

This would mean using 32 time less electricity—only 3 percent as much as in 1990. Meanwhile, with the cost of efficiency starting so low and dropping so quickly, the efficiency measures would cost almost nothing. Instead of conserving, fools that we are, we are using 34 percent more electricity, and spending $290 billion dollars per year on it.