In 2003 the US Department of Agriculture created the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP, then known as “Section 9006”) to provide grants to farmers and rural small businesses to cover up to 25% of the total costs associated with purchasing and installing renewable energy systems and making energy efficiency improvements.

As with any government program however, there’s a tedious process to go through and paperwork to fill out before receiving the funds. One of the first steps in the process is having an independent professional engineer conduct an audit estimating the potential energy savings on the specific project that they’re applying for to receive grant money. Kurt Creamer, Ph.D., says that the “actual percentage energy savings, in some cases are quite phenomenal.”

That’s where Senergy Inc., the Apex-based company hired to conduct these energy audits, comes in. Kurt Creamer, PhD, president of Senergy, founded the company in 2003 in response to REAP while he was still enrolled in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering PhD program at North Carolina State University and working full-time at the school. Even though there was a new need for energy auditors, business remained relatively slow for a few years.

“In the early days farmers had to pay up front for the energy audits which were often times quite difficult for the farmers,” Creamer said. Business for Senergy spread solely through word-of-mouth and only those farmers that could afford to front the initial costs of an audit got on board for the first 5-6 years of the program.

But then, in 2008, the North Carolina Farm Bureau got involved. The Farm Bureau covers the costs of the audits up front so that the farmers are much more willing to go through the process of applying for the REAP grants. The program (and business for Senergy) skyrocketed. It’s “been a real boom to my business to have the Farm Bureau involved in the project,” Creamer said.

Senergy’s work

Senergy typically works with farmers in Eastern North Carolina specializing in grain farms, but has had the opportunity over the years to work with a variety of types of farms including tobacco farms, some on swine & poultry farms, and a handful of dairy farms, often times on some very nontraditional projects.

One particular project on a hog farm required comparing the energy efficiency of burning the dead hogs to composting them—composting is more energy efficient, in case you were wondering. Creamer has also worked on energy efficient organic dairy farm feed grinding systems, poultry barns, irrigation systems, and grain dryers. But he’s not just limited to working on energy efficiency projects. Kurt also works on some renewable energy projects, including one this fall where he’ll be working on a “project to look at the use of sweet potatoes in an anaerobic digester,” Creamer explained, that “could generate enough biogas from the sweet potatoes to meet the requirements of the farm.”

What’s next?

Creamer says that he would love to expand in several ways:

• Geographically: There is still plenty of opportunity to pursue this program in other parts of North Carolina and beyond
• Explore the energy needs of rural small businesses (outside of the farm base)
• Take on more renewable energy projects
• Improve his engineering methodologies

At the end of the day Creamer says he really enjoys the work he does and “it’s a really good program for the farmers, and a good program for the environment.”

What I wrote last month,

“I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.”

…was reinforced when I read the book itself: I don’t know anything about infrastructure. But after reading the book I can say I know a little bit, understand how much I don’t know, and realize how much more I’d like to know. I bet it was fun watching me as I was reading it, exclaiming on average five times per page “This is so cool”, and “Hey, this is neat” and “Wow, I had no idea!” and (rarely) “w00t! Here’s a tidbit I actually heard of before” and “Hey, I know where this is!” (as I lived in Raleigh for eleven years, I know the area well).

A few years ago, Scott was just as ignorant about infrastructure as most of us are. But then his curiousity got better of him and he started researching. He would start at his house in Raleigh and trace all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. Sometimes there would be a crew on his street digging into the asphalt and fixing something and he would approach them and ask questions. At other times he would figure out where the headquarters are and who to ask to talk to:

“What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.”

In a sense, this book is a memoir of curiosity as Scott describes his own adventures with a hard-hat, a modern Jean Valjean sloshing his way through the Raleigh sewers, test-driving the public transportation, and passing multiple security checks in order to enter the nearby nuclear plant.

But it is more than just a story of personal awe at modern engineering. Scott weaves in the explanations of the engineering and the underlying science, explains the history and the politics of the Raleigh infrastructure, the historical evolution of technologies underlying modern infrasturcture, and illustrates it by comparisons to other infrastructures: how does New York City does that, how did Philadelphia did it 50 years ago, how did London 500 years ago, how about Rome 2000 years ago?

“What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.”

And this brings me to the point where I start musing about stuff that the book leaves out. As I was reading, I was constantly hungry for more. I wanted more comparisons with other cities and countries and how they solved particular problems. I wanted more history. I wanted more science. I wanted more about political angles. But then, when I finished, I realized that a book I was hungry for would be a 10-tome encyclopic monograph and a complete flop. It is good that Scott has self-control and self-discipline as a writer to know exactly what to include and what to leave out. He provides an excellent Bibliography at the end for everyone who is interested in pursuing a particular interest further. His book’s homepage is a repository for some really cool links – just click on the infrastructure you are interested in (note that “Communications” is under construction, as it is in the real world – it is undergoing a revolution as we speak so it is hard to collect a list of ‘definitive’ resources – those are yet to be written):

What many readers will likely notice as they go through the book is that there is very little about the environmental impacts of various technologies used to ensure that cities function and citizens have all their needs met. And I think this was a good strategy. If Scott included this information, many readers and critics would focus entirely on the environmental bits (already available in so many other books, articles and blogs) and completely miss what the book is all about – the ingenuity needed to keep billions of people living in some kind of semblance of normal life and the interconnectedness that infrastructure imposes on the society, even on those who would want not to be interconnected:

“There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.”

My guess is, if there’s anyone out there who could possibly not like this book, it will be die-hard libertarians who fantasize about being self-sufficient in this over-populated, inter-connected world.

At several places in the book, Scott tries to define what infrastructure is. It is a network that provides a service to everyone. It has some kind of control center, a collection center or distribution center. It has a number of peripheral stations and nodes. And there are some kinds of channels that connect the central place to the outside stations and those stations to the final users – every household in town. There is also a lot of redundancy built into the system, e.g., if a water main breaks somewhere, you will still get your water but it will come to you via other pipes in surrounding streets, with zero interruption to your service.

Scott covers surveying of land, stormwater, freshwater, wastewater, roads, power, solid waste, communications (phone, broadcast media, internet) and transportation (e.g., public transportation, trains, airplanes). These are the kinds of things that are traditionally thought of as ‘infrastructure’. But aren’t there other such systems? I’d think security has the same center-spokes model of organization as well: police stations and sub-stations (distribution centers) that can send cops out wherever needed (distribution channels), with potential criminals brought to court (processing centers) and if found guilty placed in prison (collection center). Similarly with fire-departments. Ambulances are just the most peripheral tentacles of the health-care infrastructure. The local-county-state-federal political system is also a kind of infrastructure. So is the military. So is the postal system. So is the food industry and distribution.

Thinking about all of these other potential examples of infrastructure made me realize how many services that require complex infrastructure undergo cycles of centralization and decentralization. For transportation, everyone needed to have a horse. Later, it was centralized into ship, railroad, bus and airline infrastructures. But that was counteracted by the popularity of individually owned cars. And of course taxis were there all along. And as each decade and each country has its own slight moves towards or away from centralization, in the end a balance is struck in which both modes operate.

You raised your own chickens. Then you bought them from mega-farms. Now many, but not most citizens, are raising their own chickens again. It is not feasible – not enough square miles on the planet – for everyone to raise chickens any more. But having everyone fed factory chicken is not palatable to many, either. Thus, a new, uneasy balance.

Nowhere is this seen more obviously today as in Communications infrastructure. We are in the middle of a big decentralization movement, away from broadcast (radio, TV and yes, newspaper industry infrastructure with its printing presses, distribution centers and trucks) infrastructure that marked about half of 20th century, and forward into something more resembling the media ecosystem of the most of human history – everyone is both a sender and a reciever, except that instead of writing letters or assembling at a pub every evening, we can do this online. But internet is itself an infrastructure – a series of tubes network of cables and it is essential not to allow any centralized corporation to have any power over what passes through those cables and who gets to send and receive stuff this way.

Finally, as I was reading the book I was often wishing to see photographs of places or drawings of the engineering systems he describes. As good as Scott is at putting it in words, there were times when I really wanted to actually see how something looks like. And there were times when what I really wanted was something even more interactive, perhaps an online visualization of an infrastructure system that allows me to change parameters (e.g., amount of rainfall per minute) and see how that effects some output (e.g., rate of clearing water off the streets, or speed at which it is rushing through the pipes, or how it affects the water level of the receving river). That kind of stuff would make this really come to life to me.

Perhaps “On The Grid” will have an iPad edition in the future in which the text of the book is just a begining of the journey – links to other sources (e,g., solutions around the globe, historical sources), to images, videos, interractive visualizations and, why not, real games. After all, it is right here in Raleigh that IBM is designing a game that allows one to plan and build modern infrasctructure – CityOne. These two should talk to each other and make something magnificient like that.

The store was packed. The store sold out all the books before Scott was even done talking. The C-Span Book TV crew was there filming so the event will be on TV some day soon. Scott was also, earlier yesterday, on WUNC’s The State Of Things (the podcast will soon be online here) and the day before that he was on KERA’s Think with Krys Boyd (download MP3 podcast by clicking here).

Scott’s energy and enthusiasm are infectuos. He held the audience captive and often laughing. The questions at the end were smart and his answers perfectly on target. But most importantly, we all learned a lot last night. I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.

What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.

There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.

What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.

I got the book last night and am about to start reading it – very eagerly so. Scott started with his house in Raleigh and traced all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. He compared what he learned in Raleigh and its various infrastructure experts and officials, to the equivalent services in other geographical places, and traced them back in history. I can’t wait to read the synthesis of all that research. I hope you will read it, too.

A concentrated photovoltaic "solar tree" designed by MegaWatt Solar. (Image from MegaWatt Solar web site.)

I recently wrote a two-part post here reporting on a forum in Research Triangle Park which focused on barriers to homegrown global business innovation in the Triangle and in North Carolina. While contemplating the themes of the forum, and skimming today’s science news, I stumbled across this article in  Popular Mechanics magazine which looks into the advances in concentrated photovoltaics over the past few years — and leads with the example of MegaWatt Solar, a renewable energy start-up in our own backyard. The company was formed by three professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who seek to create utility-scaled concentrated photovoltaic systems to supplement fossil fuels-based energy production. (They’ve also been featured in UNC’s Endeavors research magazine, and have landed a story or two in the News & Observer, no longer available in their web archives.)

It struck me that MegaWatt Solar is a good example of the applied research that our area universities can generate to solve real-world problems, and also of the links that can be established between professors with marketable ideas and business-savvy entrepreneurs that can help carry the ideas from the research bench to the bank. Their story is truly one of homegrown innovation, though to be fair they are still in the pilot study phase and working out some kinks.

Because I’ve already written this story, I’m not going to write it again… Below is a reprint of the cover story article I penned about the people behind MegaWatt Solar, and their mission, for the fall 2009 issue of UNC College of Arts & Sciences magazine. It is reprinted here with full permission from the editors.

UNC Arts & Science cover, fall 2009, with MegaWatt Solar founders.

The Power of 20 Suns

MegaWatt Solar is a small start-up energy company in Hillsborough, N.C., backed by $17 million from Norwegian venture capitalists and mentally powered by three researchers in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. Tucked away in a brick textile-mill-turned-office-park, the company is poised to bring a new concentrated photovoltaic system to market that could provide the cheapest large-scale renewable source of electricity available anywhere.

But they didn’t design it for your home. They designed it for your utility company, to offset peak energy demand, which tends to coincide with the sunniest portions of the solar day. The term MegaWatt describes their goal of producing one megawatt of electricity from over a thousand solar “trees” spread across about 10 acres. The solar trees rotate on a dual axis mount that tracks the sun across the sky vault. One megawatt of electricity — one million watts — is enough to power about 800 homes.

MegaWatt Solar was founded by astrophysicist Chris Clemens, theoretical physicist Charles Evans, computer scientist Russ Taylor and a private sector power-grid systems engineer, Dan Gregory. They built their alpha version in spring 2006 in Evans’ driveway from what he describes as “an aluminum erector set for adults,” with parts bought off E-Bay, cheap advertising signboard and a highly reflective material scavenged from the interior of a Solotube skylight.

The best part? It worked.

“Boy, it was bright, “Evans said. “Everyone ran to get their sunglasses.”

They measured its electrical output and knew they were on to something red hot. The alpha reflector had a concentrating factor of 24:1. However, the team reduced this to 20:1 in their final design, to balance limitations from excessive heat buildup with low-cost solutions. Still, the power of 20 suns is impressive.

Since that weekend science project, the researchers have ruthlessly honed their design in an iterative process. They are on their fourth version, which uses four trough-shaped mirrors to produce about 0.75 kilowatts, and Clemens thinks they are nearing the finish line. He believes they will have a marketable product within a year that produces 1 kilowatt. A power utility would need to install about 1,000 of the concentrated solar trees, which Taylor estimates would take about 10 acres, to produce one megawatt. From the get-go, the trio wanted the design to be as low-cost as possible.

Rows of photovoltaic cells engineered to receive 20 times the concentration of normal sunlight. (Image from MegaWatt Solar web site.)

They have one pilot project in Caswell County, where Piedmont Electric Membership Corporation has installed sixteen 12-mirror solar trees. The team is retro-fitting the units to address wind demands, but they expect the new solar plant to be online by December, when they will begin field-testing them. A second pilot project is planned in Florida. They are also field testing six units that are located a stone’s throw from their Hillsborough office. MegaWatt’s solar trees are modular in design, to allow for periodic upgrades in a fast-paced technological world. Clemens, whose background is in astronomical instrumentation, designed the rough concept for the unit, and Evans focused on perfecting the light collecting and concentrating system.

“One of our mantras was that because the mirrors are the component that would cover a lot of ground, they had to pretty much be cheaper than dirt,” Evans said. They settled on an inexpensive exterior signboard material called Dibond, topped with a 3M film. Clemens jokes that it is the “cheapest mirror known to man,” but its 94 percent reflectivity and extremely light-weight aluminum frame are no joke. Taylor and his team worked on the computing that drives the dual-axis mechanical and optical tracking system. His team designed software that learns and anticipates where the reflectors need to be, and directs them there. This software allows the units to be installed anywhere on earth, he said, and within three days the unit will learn all it needs to know to track the sun and keep the reflectors in the right place.

Clemens and Evans extensively researched other concentrated photovoltaic projects and picked the best elements from them. A central key to their process was using existing technologies and materials, which kept costs down. MegaWatt Solar does not plan to mass produce the solar trees. Rather, they plan to work directly with interested utilities, license the design to large engineering firms, and advise local contractors on the construction and parts-purchasing.

They’re not the first to propose concentrating light to make more efficient use of photovoltaic cells. But they may be the first to do it cheaply, reliably and at a utility scale.

Photon waves. (Wiki Commons)

The search for clean energy technologies is sparking a renewed effort to create fuels from sunlight-driven chemical reactions. Solar fuel technologies exist today but chemists across the nation are trying to figure out how to increase the efficiency of the reactions and create the next generation of photovoltaics.

About 100 faculty, students and visiting scientists gathered at the Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill campus on Thursday to discuss advances in solar fuels research.

The event, organized by the Solar Energy Research Center, drew speakers from Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. SERC itself is a consortium of UNC-CH, Duke, N.C. State University, N.C. Central University with RTI in Research Triangle Park.

UNC chemistry professor Tom Meyer, who is also the SERC director, said the group is a great example of the “new way of doing science” and bringing university research into collaboration with industry. Thursday’s gathering kicked off SERC’s second annual solar energy fuels conference, “Solar Fuels and Energy Storage: The Unmet Needs.”

Thursday and Friday were highly technical talks describing chemical mechanisms and applications that are advancing the field of solar-driven chemical energy. A public outreach component of the conference will take place 5 p.m. – 9 p.m. Friday at UNC’s Friday Center. At the outreach event, Meyer and several other speakers will talk with interested members of the public about the future, and the challenges, of creating solar-driven chemical fuels for applications in transportation and industrial-scaled energy distribution.

During the technical talks on Thursday, Gerald Meyer of Johns Hopkins University presented work detailing advances in molecular excited states showing light-induced electron transfers between molecules. In one example, he described a light-driven bonding reaction between iodide atoms and said the work could be a model for light-driven bonding reactions involving oxygen. Researchers like Meyer are experimenting with designing molecules that can be attached to a titanium dioxide substrate in order to create a reaction that will siphon off electrons after a photon of light strikes the material. Called dye-sensitive solar cells, this approach is proven to work but scientists are wrestling with creating a designer organic molecule that will yield higher efficiencies.

John Miller of JME, Inc. spoke about the future of bulk energy storage, citing research into how to increase the storage capabilities of electrochemical capacitors. He noted that maximum storage ability in these devices had increased “nine orders of magnitude” in his lifetime. The best capacitors consist of an asymmetrical electrodes placed in an electrolyte solution. The surface area of the electrodes is the limiting factor to increasing levels of energy storage, he said. The asymmetrical systems have disproportionately long discharge capabilities relative to their charging time, he said. The capacitors could be used in the future to store energy produced from utilities during non-peak hours at night, then be discharged into the electrical grid during peak hours – contributing to regularizing energy production. Currently, the largest units can discharge 20 watt hours per kilogram over a five-hour period.

Héctor Abruña, from Cornell University, spoke about electrocatalytic fuel cells and new applications in spectroscopsy to characterize the interface of nanoparticle reactions. He focused on describing the crystal structure of “ordered intermetallics” such as nanoparticle blends between platinum and lead or platinum and ruthenium, and how to quantify the electrochemical performance of these materials using scanning transmission electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. He described a new application in imaging where his lab rotated the imaging device around an ordered intermetallic group of nanoparticles to better understand how they were reacting in three-dimensions and over time.

There were many other talks, and the full listing can be found here.

According to Huang, who is an electrical and computer engineering professor at N.C. State University, the U.S. ranks low on the global spectrum of developed nations that source renewable energy. We’re also overly-reliant on fossil fuels, and we tend to import these fuels from politically unstable regions of the world. Not much new there… but Huang’s FREEDM Systems center is thinking up ways to counter these factors.

The FREEDM Systems center is a consortium of collaborating universities, utilities and businesses. By spanning from think-tank groups at universities to market-savvy businesses, he says they offer “transformational research” with a focus on moving innovational research into the marketplace. In addition to working with businesses to develop suitable business models, the center also analyzes international energy markets and energy forecasts.

Revamping the nation’s electric grid tops Huang’s list of must-do items. In his vision, the new grid is analogous to the internet… it’s an “energy internet” actually. A major innovation of the internet is that it allowed people to share information more easily by making data more freely accessible and by allowing people to upload and download at will. Substitute “information” in that sentence for “electron” and you might see where he’s going with this analogy.

“In the energy world, we need to learn to share the electron,” Huang says. Big utilities would need to move from an ownership model to a user-sharing model — not a simple adaptation to make, but one that he says is more oriented to the services demanded by customers. A revamped grid would draw energy from largely renewable and de-centralized sources and then distribute it in a new framework that is akin to distributed computing versus a central mainframe. By creating small islands of homes or businesses connected to energy routers with shut-off software controls, major blackouts would become a thing of the past, Huang says.

Devising energy islands for homes would mean that small groups of residences are linked to decentralized, software-controlled router units connected to a main distribution system (supported in turn by the decentralized, renewable sources). The grid software would monitor and control a bi-directional energy flow. This controlled flow would allow people to “upload” energy from their own personal storage devices if they, say, had solar panels or a wind turbine that generated extra current, and get energy credits. But changing to a controllable bi-directional flow system would require a massive switch from the transformers we know today to a new “solid state transformer” — and Huang says we don’t even have the components to build it today. (Bummer. On a personal note, this is where my excitement deflated.)

“This solid state transformer would be made from different materials and require different physics than a normal transformer to make it work,” Huang says. It’s also an example of something the FREEDM center is banding together in an interdisciplinary fashion to try to create, starting with research into silicon carbide semiconductor chips.

So… if they can build the futuristic solid state transformer how might this vision for a greener tomorrow come to fruition? Huang says he sees disruptive business models as the key. Just as Google, YouTube and EBay sent disruptive waves through the media industries, he sees innovative businesses as the solution to bringing a new electrical grid to customers. For more details about the FREEDM Systems center, its researchers, collaborators, industry partners and burgeoning ideas, please visit: http://www.freedm.ncsu.edu/

Lovins is not your run-of-the-mill environmentalist. Far from it. He is a physicist who harbors a vision for lowering global greenhouse gas emissions by 3 to 4 percent annually — without government subsidies or policies — and he has a lengthy performance record of creating profits from sustainable business solutions that eviscerate conventional wisdom.

“I’m getting tired of redesigning things that weren’t designed right in the first place,” Lovins confessed last night to a standing-room only crowd of about 275 people at Love Auditorium on Duke University’s campus.

Lovins is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo., a non-profit “think-and-do-tank” with an unusual vision for reinventing the way we design and fuel our built environment and transportation networks. He carried a few pieces of this vision to the Triangle where he was the inaugural speaker for a new “Environment and Society” lectures series sponsored by Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. An estimated 600 or so people tuned in to watch the event streamed live over the web, and 50-plus people were turned away from the packed auditorium after trying to squat in the aisle steps.

Over the course of his 80-minute talk, Lovins spewed facts, figures and graphs depicting multiple paths for the U.S. and major industries to reduce oil, coal and electricity consumption. And he claimed they could turn huge profits doing so. He forecast a future where major business and industry invent a new energy culture devoid of oil and heavily reliant on renewables that fuel revamped aviation, car and truck designs.

The take-home message of the night was not a technical fix directed at individual consumers, such as “buy compact fluorescent light bulbs.” Rather, it was a message that energy efficiencies, availability of renewable energy sources and improved product designs will trickle down to the rest of us as major industries blaze the way to a sustainable future.

Lovins presented case after case where whittling down a few percentages of energy use here and there could culminate in moving society toward a reduced dependence on dirty fuels. But the end goal of a more environmentally-healthy future was nearly obscured by his fascination with how to get there, which requires reinventing the way we design and manufacture products, do business and build our cities and homes.

He focused on a handful of major industries that could, he said, turn the tide on energy efficiency and renewables for the rest of us: aviation, heavy trucks, military, fuels, finance and cars and light trucks. Policies, taxes and subsidies will do nothing to nudge these sectors toward a clean energy future, he said. But the economic markets will if major industries can capitalize on energy efficiencies in their built infrastructure, supply chains and transportation systems.

Personally, my Red Flag of Skepticism reaches full mast when anyone points to the economic markets as the sole driving force leading the way to a clean energy future. But Lovins did make some excellent points, including reinventing the way we design our buildings, cars and trucks. Now that is something I can get firmly behind.

Flipping through slides of redesigned airplanes and concept cars, he declared that ultralighting vehicles — using new designs and materials to make them lighter by attacking the physics platform first — was “as much fun as you can with your clothes on.” Because the U.S. expends half its oil budget on inefficient transportation, he said that major savings could be found by just making cars lighter. It’s pointless to run our autos on “primeval swamp goo,” he said, when 87 percent of the fuel energy never actually reaches the wheels and only .3 percent actually moves you, the driver. And vehicles with hybrid fuel sources don’t entirely fix the problem either if they are still heavy.

“The way to make hybrids cost-efficient is to not need as many batteries in the first place,” he said.

Extolling the virtues of ultra-lighting cars and trucks with new composite materials, Lovins passed around a bowl-shaped sample of what the future may hold, a carbon-fiber and thermoplastic composite material strong enough to form a car frame, but light enough that a person could lift with one hand an entire car door made from the stuff. But he did not fully address the safety that such lightweight materials would offer out on the road.

With parts so light, heavy manufacturing machinery like mechanical hoists become unnecessary, and using lighter-weight materials would spur a retooling of auto plants such that the next generation assembly line would require at least two-fifths less investment than today’s leanest plants, he claimed. But the new materials would not impact a car’s price, Lovins asserted, drawing as an example a 2003 Chrysler ultralight hybrid concept car that got 67 mpg.

Ultra-lighting is just one example of the many ideas Lovins’ presented as to how to go about revamping our conventional, energy-intensive way of doing things. He also attacked the big-picture financial costs of investing in nuclear power, and examined the minutiae of energy bleeds in “bloated software” and inefficient corporate IT systems. He pointed to numerous cases of large business improving their energy efficiencies whether or not they were worried about climate change or the environment. He rattled of massive profits earned by Interface, DOW, Dupont, IBM and British Petroleum gained by investing in strategies which also cut the companies’ energy use and reduced their greenhouse gas emissions.

If you couldn’t make the lecture – or if you got kicked out for squatting on the aisle steps before it even started – then you can watch a recorded version online.