General
Factor Ten Engineering Design Principles
Designers often assume that radical efficiency is too expensive. Yet RMI’s Factor Ten Engineering initiative demonstrates that very large energy and resource savings can be very profitable across a wide range of applications. Factor Ten Engineering uses such innovations to transform design and engineering practice, via whole-system thinking and integrative…
Reply to William Tucker’s Critique of Amory Lovins’s Article “Nuclear Socialism”
On 26 October 2010, The American Spectator published William Tucker’s critical article about Amory Lovins’s “Nuclear Socialism” article in The Weekly Standard. The American Spectator didn’t acknowledge or publish Mr. Lovins’s 1 November reply, so on 14 December he posted it as a comment and RMI published it here.
Presentation of Achieving Low-Cost Solar PV: Industry Workshop Recommendations for Near-Term Balance-of-System Cost Reductions
This presentation provides a high-level overview of key technical and process best practices that emerged from RMI’s June 2010 “Solar PV Balance of System” design charrette in a graphical format. It includes the main charts and graphs that summarize the report analysis and recommendations. BoS costs—all the upfront costs associated…
Achieving Low-Cost Solar PV: Industry Workshop Recommendations for Near-Term Balance-of-System Cost Reductions
This report synthesizes the specific design strategies and technical and process best practices that emerged from RMI’s June 2010 “Solar PV Balance of System” design charrette. BoS costs—all the upfront costs associated with a PV system except the module—account for over half of PV system cost and pose a barrier…
Efficiency and Micropower for Reliable and Resilient Electricity Service: An Intriguing Case-Study from Cuba
Cuba’s decrepit electricity grid suffered 188 days of significant blackouts in 2004, 224 in 2005, 3 in 2006, and 0 in 2007. This dramatic improvement was due to a nationwide efficiency program, a crash program of switching to a majority of distributed generation, and reorganizing grid architecture around islandable netted…