Amory Lovins: Astonishing Energy Futures - SEG Annual Keynote Lecture 2019

We're delighted to announce this year's speaker for the SEG Annual Keynote Lecture, Professor Amory Lovins. Amory, who is a physicist and Chief Scientist and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, will be talking about 'Astonishing Energy Futures'.

The talk will be introduced by Prof Benjamin Sovacool and Dr Marie Claire Brisbois.

Don't miss the opportunity to hear from one of the most esteemed and legendary figures of the energy field and sign up now.

Details below:

Talk summary

Most of the energy we use is wasted. Smarter technologies and designs that use energy more efficiently could provide the same or better services with far less energy, money, and risk. Moreover, the fossil fuels that provide most of our energy now generally cost more than the modern renewable sources that have already taken over two-thirds of the world’s power-plant market. These profound shifts in both demand and supply set the stage for rapid change in almost everything we thought we knew about energy. Oil suppliers have more unsellable than unburnable oil: they are more at risk from competition than from regulation. Electricity suppliers too face a swarm of disruptors that will transform their business beyond recognition. And meanwhile, Edison’s electric industry is merging with Ford’s auto industry to eat Rockefeller’s oil industry—while insurgents challenge incumbents in all three of these giant industries. These transformations offer remarkable opportunities for informed citizens in every community to build a durable economy and to make energy supplies resilient, so catastrophic interruptions of supply shift from inevitable to impossible. Evidence is now emerging in such major economies as China, India, USA, and EU that if based on the lowest-cost available resources, ambitious global climate protection can be not costly but profitable.

Speaker bio

Amory B. Lovins is Co-founder, Chief Scientist, and Chairman Emeritus of Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado (RMI)—an independent, apolitical, nonprofit think-do-and-scale tank that helps create a clean, prosperous, secure, low-carbon energy future.

A Harvard and Oxford dropout and former Oxford don, Lovins has advised major firms and governments worldwide for 46 years and briefed several dozen heads of state. He has taught at ten universities, most recently Stanford’s School of Engineering and the US Naval Postgraduate School, but only topics he’s not formally studied, so as to retain beginner’s mind. He is perhaps most noted for reframing the energy problem in 1976.

A MacArthur and Ashoka Fellow, and originally a consultant experimental physicist, Lovins is among the world’s leading innovators in energy and its links with resources, security, development, environment, and economy. He has written 31 books and more than 630 papers, and designed many superefficient buildings, vehicles, and factories.

He has advised the energy and other industries for more than four decades as well as the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense. His work in more than 70 countries has been recognized by the “Alternative Nobel,” Blue Planet, Volvo, Zayed, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, the Benjamin Franklin and Happold Medals, 12 honorary doctorates, honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects, foreign membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts (UK), the Heinz, Lindbergh, National Design, and World Technology Awards, and the President of Germany’s Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse). He has served on the US National Petroleum Council and two US Defense Science Board panels. Time named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and Foreign Policy, one of the 100 top global thinkers.

Lovins’ studies began in music, classics, linguistics, law, medicine, and mountaineering. His avocations include landscape photography, Taoism, and great-ape language and conservation. His wife and colleague Judy Hill Lovins is a fine-art landscape photographer and master printmaker.

Further reading

Read and listen to Carbon Brief's interview with Amory Lovins from 2017.