Since 1982, Rocky Mountain Institute has fostered the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life sustaining.
In April 2009, we reframed that statement (only a few words of which had changed) to say the same thing even better in changing times.
We separated the vision statement — a world thriving, verdant, and secure, for all, for ever — and changed the mission statement’s verb to one less diffident than “foster,” so now we drive the efficient and restorative use of resources.
RMI does solutions, not problems; transformation, not incrementalism; practice, not theory. We create effective and original action by transforming design, busting barriers, and spreading innovations. Our patient labor of discovering and multiplying rewarding solutions is now coming together in our most ambitious effort yet: reshaping how the world gets and uses energy.
RMI’s strategic focus, sharpened in 2009, weaves together much of our energy work of the past 27 years plus further innovations, and applies our discovery of how integrative design can achieve expanding, not diminishing, returns to investments in advanced energy efficiency. We call this strategic focus “Reinventing Fire”: mapping and driving the profitable transition from oil and coal to efficiency and renewables. This transformational shift can bring an oil-free world, a stabilized climate, nuclear nonproliferation, less poverty, more stability, and durable prosperity.
The oil half of Reinventing Fire is well underway.
Five years ago, RMI’s Pentagon-cosponsored "Winning the Oil Endgame," detailed how to eliminate U.S. oil use by the 2040s, led by business for profit, at an average cost of $15 per barrel (2000 $). That visionary but severely practical roadmap has quietly refocused the oil conversation from small import reductions to complete displacement, as markets validated our past two decades’ prediction that oil would become uncompetitive even at low prices before it became unavailable even at high prices. Our implementation effort via “institutional acupuncture” is also bearing fruit. In April 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. gasoline demand had peaked and is headed permanently down. Not bad so far for a three-year, $4-million effort to displace the world’s largest industry, whose product causes 43 percent of U.S. fossil carbon emissions.
Next we aim to help speed the transformation of the electricity sector, which emits another 41 percent of that carbon, 92 percent of it from coal. For decades, RMI has been the global thought leader on how efficiency can save most of the electricity used in buildings (70 percent of U.S. usage) and industry (30 percent), and why distributed generation is often about tenfold more valuable than had been thought. “Negawatts” and “micropower,” once dismissed as trivial, now dominate the competitive landscape, delivering most of the world’s new electrical services. In 2008, for the first time in about a century, the world invested more in renewable than in fossil-fueled power.
But how will all the moving parts fit together to transform the electricity industry?
Some people still claim solar and windpower can’t do much because they don’t always work. But neither does any traditional power plant: sources of electricity differ only in the size, duration, frequency, cause, and predictability of their failures. Extending utilities’ proven techniques for managing intermittent supply and fluctuating demand, RMI is now synthesizing a practical vision of the shape, stability, economics, and transitional path of an efficient, diverse, dispersed, renewable, resilient, and climate-safe electricity system that should work better and cost less than today’s grid.
This seminal thinking is already starting to reshape both utility strategy and public policy. And we’re starting to weave the integrative-design, oil, electricity, gas, direct-coal, and related stories into a coherent synthesis of how to win the entire fossil-fuel endgame, again led by business for profit.
Frances Moore Lappé said, “Hope is a stance, not an assessment.” Our work and your help are making that assessment ever more compelling.
Amory B. Lovins
Cofounder, Chairman, and Chief Scientist
Old Snowmass, Colorado
September 2009