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"   Click here to post this video on your blog or website.   Click here to post a photo of this winner on your blog or website. Amory Lovins showers with solar-heated water and dries his clothes using a ladder-shaped system he rigged from galvanized pipe and nylon rope inside a specially built light shaft. He raises and lowers the clothes using a boat winch. Tinkering with such contraptions is relaxing for a guy with the weight of a poorly designed world on his shoulders, and he&amp;#039;s all about reining in errant kilowatt-hours. But what Amory Lovins really finds satisfying is problem-solving on a bigger scale. Like transforming the U.S. economy, one inefficient industry after another. He is a pragmatic, pliers-in-hand visionary with a penchant for physics who spends his time engineering a future in which Americans stop burning fossil fuels, yet improve their standard of living. Getting there, he&amp;#039;s certain, is mainly a matter of tapping a nearly limitless resource--corporate pressure to cut costs and improve the bottom line. Case in point: Texas Instruments. Back in 2001, the electronics giant faced pressure to save money on its next multi-billion-dollar computer-chip fabrication facility, or &amp;quot;fab,&amp;quot; which was to employ a thousand workers. The obvious solution was to build it overseas. But first, eco-minded executives at TI teamed up with Lovins and his &amp;quot;think and do&amp;quot; tank, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), to look for cost-cutting alternatives. During an intense, three-day session they came up with a list of 15 &amp;quot;Big Honkin&amp;#039; Ideas&amp;quot; for building and running a fab more efficiently. The team noticed that TI&amp;#039;s fabs wasted energy cooling millions of gallons of water to 40 degrees, when much of it only needed to be 54 degrees. They identified ways to recapture waste heat--cutting both energy bills and the number of expensive cooling towers they&amp;#039;d need to install. And they redesigned the water pipes to allow for cheaper, smaller pumps. It wasn&amp;#039;t sexy stuff. But in chip-making plants, where &amp;quot;clean rooms&amp;quot; are kept at precise temperatures and are 1000 times more sterile than a hospital operating room, electricity is an enormous operating expense, topping $15 million a year. In a high-tech world, low-tech wiring still means a lot.  --&amp;amp;gt;  Tucked into a hillside at 7200 ft. above sea level and facing winter temperatures as low as 40 below, the stone building where Lovins lives and works is a showcase of efficiency. The structure has no boiler or furnace, relying instead on two small wood stoves, a passive solar design, ample insulation and a supertight envelope. Inside is a greenhouse that stays warm enough in winter to grow tropical fruits, including guavas, pineapples and, over the years, 28 banana crops. The monthly power bill for the residential half of the building is $5. The August day I arrive, I park beside Lovins&amp;#039;s dusty blue Honda Insight hybrid with an IGO-ECO vanity plate and a bumper sticker that reads: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d rather be driving a Hypercar,&amp;quot; a reference to the ultralight, ultraefficient concept car Lovins and RMI developed in the 1990s. Inside, it&amp;#039;s warm and muggy--cooler when someone remembers to open the greenhouse windows--and filled with a pale natural light. Water burbles in the recently redesigned greenhouse stream. Lovins emerges from a small loft office above a few workstations. (Only a handful of staff members work here; the other 70 or so are evenly divided between a nearby building and a Boulder office.) Relaxed and soft-spoken, he wears soft-soled shoes and a blue dress shirt; his pocket bulges with pens and index cards. We sit in his dining room, overlooking avocado and fig trees. &amp;quot;My ambition,&amp;quot; he says dryly, &amp;quot;is to grow vines and swing to work.&amp;quot; Lovins dropped out of Harvard rather than be forced to limit his wide-ranging studies to a single major or two; then he enrolled in Oxford, but left when he wasn&amp;#039;t allowed to pursue a doctorate in energy. &amp;quot;They said: `Energy? We don&amp;#039;t have a chair in it. Pick a real subject,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; he says, chuckling. That was three years before the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. Then, in 1976, Lovins made energy-wonk history with an essay in the journal Foreign Affairs (&amp;quot;Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?&amp;quot;) that stumped for the radical efficiency and smart engineering that Lovins has been advancing ever since. &amp;quot;People don&amp;#039;t want raw kilowatt-hours or lumps of coal or barrels of sticky black goo,&amp;quot; Lovins says. &amp;quot;They want hot showers, cold beer, comfort, mobility, illumination. It&amp;#039;s like when you go to the hardware store looking for a drill. What you really want is not a drill but a hole. And why do you want the hole?&amp;quot; Asking such questions, Lovins says, is the first step in good design. His end-use/least-cost analysis of just about everything has always won listeners--he has briefed 19 heads of state and consulted for more than 80 Fortune 500 companies--but in recent years it&amp;#039;s increasingly led to changes in the real world. Over the past year, RMI has doubled the size of its research and consulting team to keep up with the demand for its services. TI broke ground--Texas ground--on its new state-of-the-art, million-square-foot semiconductor facility in November 2004. By implementing a dozen of those Big Honkin&amp;#039; Ideas, the company set off a series of cascading benefits that saved nearly $150 million in construction costs. The plant hasn&amp;#039;t yet opened for business--it&amp;#039;s been slowed by the vagaries of the computer-chip market--but once in operation, it should use 20 percent less energy and 35 percent less water, and emit 50 percent less nitrous oxide into the air than previous fabs. The project crystalizes the RMI approach: Cooperation with industry leads to greater efficiency, less money spent up front, lowered operating expenses and--let&amp;#039;s not forget--a reduction in fossil fuels dug up, transported and burned.   --&amp;amp;gt;  &amp;quot;We decided decades ago that in a world with three main foci of power and action--business, civil society and government--we would get the most done by working with the private sector,&amp;quot; Lovins says. Along with Texas Instruments, RMI clients include Monsanto, Royal Dutch/Shell and the mining giant Anglo American, all considered the enemy by many environmental groups. RMI has made headlines recently by helping Wal-Mart with plans to double the fuel efficiency of its 6800-strong trucking fleet--among the biggest in the world--by 2015. The program could save the company upward of $300 million dollars per year and cut CO2 emissions by 690,000 tons annually. The 800-pound retail gorilla could end up causing the entire trucking industry to follow its lead. Now Lovins has a green bull&amp;#039;s-eye painted on the world&amp;#039;s biggest buyer of oil, the Pentagon, which helped fund RMI&amp;#039;s Winning the Oil Endgame, a book published in 2004 that painstakingly details a plan for weaning America off oil by the middle of this century, with private businesses taking the lead. Reducing oil consumption would not only save the U.S. Department of Defense tens of billions of dollars, it would also reduce the size of vulnerable fuel convoys. Lovins says that just as military R&amp;amp;amp;D created the Internet, GPS, and the jet and computer-chip industries, a new Pentagon effort may jumpstart a revolution in efficient automotive technologies. At heart, however, Lovins remains a private-sector guy, a tinkerer. His pet project is the Hypercar referenced on his bumper sticker, which RMI proposed in 1991 as a midpriced vehicle that would get more than 100 mpg and inspire innovation among Detroit automakers. The car companies argued that the technologies involved--including feathery carbon-fiber bodies and hybrid powertrains--were too expensive for mass-market vehicles. Besides, gas was cheap. Today, both carbon-fiber and hybrid power are gradually making their way into vehicles. And Lovins is more puzzled than frustrated when the corporate world moves at a slower pace than he&amp;#039;d like. No matter. Eventually he figures they&amp;#039;ll have to come around, if only to keep up with resource-sipping competitors like Wal-Mart. If the accountants don&amp;#039;t lead the way, the engineers surely will. Resource-savvy design is just the thing to restore &amp;quot;the existential joy&amp;quot; that made them be-come engineers in the first place, Lovins says. &amp;quot;It isn&amp;#039;t about Infectious repetitus--copying the last set of drawings--but about thinking through original and elegant design solutions.&amp;quot; Once you start seeing fixes rather than problems, he insists, there&amp;#039;s no going back. It&amp;#039;s just too much fun. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a2146/4224757/>