一趟下来软能源之路
W母鸡1973年的石油危机威胁的安全与繁荣，美国的初始应对政策感到困惑和无效的。
强化照旧 - 钻探石油和天然气井，建设煤炭巨头和核电厂，可能发展煤制油合成燃料 - 大力提议，但很快就开始寻找成本太高，脏，缓慢而艰难。巨大的资金需求会扼杀其他必要的投资，并最终使能源价格飙升，使摇摇欲坠的需求无法支付昂贵的新设备。然而，到1976年秋，没有连贯的另一种愿景已经阐述。政策想象力被卡住。
在那个教育时机，我外交部文章“能源战略：未选择的路？”重新定义能源问题和增加美国能源战略的另一种观点。
“硬路”更相同的;“软路径”与转向可再生供应组合的能量效率。这篇文章很快就成为了历史悠久的杂志的最转载，作为病毒传播的预互联网技术许可。四十多年后，其初始的接收和持续的影响，说明了什么教训并没有被吸取了审查。
一看回1976年
这个28岁的作家，感觉就像丢弃晶种的过饱和溶液，突然结晶液体进入了一个全新的形式。
A year later, President Jimmy Carter invited me into the Oval Office to discuss the article. He now says he found it very helpful in forming his energy policy — apart from Energy Secretary Schlesinger’s synfuels effort, the most coherently pro-efficiency-and-renewables policy before or since.
现任能源产业迎来了怀疑，蔑视，甚至是愤怒的文章。4英寸厚的参议院听证会记录编译批评和响应的三十几对。如今，它使有趣的阅读，提醒我们，40年前的能源效率是新颖的争议，而可再生能源是奇怪的，威胁性或荒谬的。有些人仍然坚持这些观点。
When the hubbub died down, ARCO’s chief economist, David Sternlight, nicely captured the conclusion of sober observers: He for one didn’t care if I were only half right — that would be better performance than he’d seen from the rest of them.
Over the next decade, the article’s thesis gained enough credence that many of its harshest critics hired RMI, founded in 1982, to help them adopt it. By the current decade, two leading journals of the electricity industry generously recognized our approach’s prescience, and the article’s thesis broadly has prevailed in the energy marketplace.
这篇文章是如此有影响力，因为，而不是仅仅提出能源投资的又一个投资组合，它重新定义他们的目的和逻辑。此前，该问题是在哪里得到更多的能量 - 更多，任何种类的，从任何来源，不惜任何代价。规划人员推断能源需求增长的历史和内置电源，以满足它。
通过询问我们希望能在另一端开始的文章 - 什么是“最终用途”我们的追捧，如热水淋浴，冰镇啤酒，流动性，舒适性，冶炼氧化铝，烤面包 - 以及如何提供那些服务中的通过提供的数量，种类，规模和能量的来源最适合的任务。
This end-use concept soon merged with Roger Sant’s "least-cost" language, resonant with the emerging Reaganomics emphasis on free markets. The resulting "end-use/least-cost" approach revealed the most cost-effective solutions, chosen via competition or planning, to such questions as whether to keep warm in winter by gas or electric heating, or by insulation and weatherstripping.
Different questions yield different answers, so the article contrasted two ways the U.S. energy system could evolve (Figures 1A and 1B).
储蓄：准确预见
A later scholarly review found the article had been the only one of dozens of mid-1970s studies with accurate foresight about total U.S. primary energy use in 2000 (foresight, but explicitly not a forecast, as it is often still mischaracterized). The soft path shown in Figure 1B is 0.8 or 4.0 percent below actual 2000 energy use, normalizing to actual GDP growth or not, respectively. But the best contemporaneous econometric forecasts were about 60–70 percent too high. Then in 2000–15, far from turning upwards, energy intensity fell by a further 24 percent.
图2比较了假想的能量应力y trajectory the article suggested as feasible in 1976, falling 72 percent in 50 years, with its actual 56 percent fall in 40 years. The "near-halving" envisaged by "about the turn of the century" occurred in 2008.
为了使实际国内生产总值的美元，美国在2015年用56％少占一次能源比1975年，59％的煤少，65％的少油直接使用天然气。煤炭公司的2015年每股主电源（16.0％）的的低于其先前后二战低（1972年16.6％）。相反，美国得到了它的主要能源使用的10％，来自可再生能源的电力使用，这是新的附加发电量的68％的14％。
电力是能源的最昂贵形式，但美国人只有一半快速直接燃油节省电力。这部分是因为直到2001年左右，美国48个州的效用仍然奖励销售更多的能量;即使是现在，这是在36个州进行的电力（与改革八待定）和28气体（在四个悬而未决的改革）。但是，随着这种倒行逆施的政策开始淡出，用电量从2007年的峰值飘了过来。从长远来看，可能约1％的一年，尽管坚实的经济增长和全电动汽车缩水。
供应转变：由相反的政策延迟
The demand-side foresight of the projected soft path wasn’t matched on the supply side (Figure 3). Although some states such as California successfully pursued their own soft paths, powerful lobbies and hence national policy strongly favored the hard path in energy supply.
图3A和3B之间的差异具有影响供给的每个元素三个主要原因：
- 那么天然气被认为是石油日益减少的稀缺副产品，所以联邦政策禁止其发电厂利用1978年至1987年，并有力地推动燃煤发电来代替。这丰富的煤炭运输车队，从尼克松时代的环保法律豁免久，现在才衰落而复活的气体存在。
- Once President Gerald Ford got auto-efficiency standards passed into law in 1975 (effective 1978), U.S. oil intensity fell by an average of 5.2 percent per year. But the resulting 1985–86 oil price crash fostered complacency. This helped lobbyists persuade Congress to ignore — for 25 years for cars and for about 17 years for light trucks — the legal mandate to raise efficiency standards in step with technologies.
- 轻型车辆效率恶化在1987〜2004年，以22年只是为了恢复其1987年的水平：节油的速度下降了三分之二，约99发动机效率的主要收益的百分比提高加速度，而不是节省燃油。立法阻止，直到G.W.总裁布什2007年的更新，那么新规则，一年后悬挂际底特律的困扰。这种停滞浪费了汽车数量的两次失误，延长了四分之一世纪的高油价的需求，同时石油利益试图抑制竞争的生物燃料。
- The rapid growth of "soft technologies" (diverse, right-sized, right-quality, widely accessible renewables) in Figures 1B and 3B, predicated on "aggressive support," instead got largely hostile federal policies for 32 of the past 40 years. Even the fossil-fuel companies that invested in renewables impatiently dumped them just as they were poised for success.
事情我得到了正确的
Climate understanding isn’t new. The 1976 Foreign Affairs article said of the hard path:
"The commitment to a long-term coal economy many times the scale of today’s makes the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration early in the next century virtually unavoidable, with the prospect then or soon thereafter of substantial and perhaps irreversible changes in global climate. Only the exact date of such changes is in question."
Are we there yet? Cue the Clean Power Plan and the Paris Agreement.
预计RMI 2002年的著作“小是有利可图的”和今天的市场走势，文章称避免电网的成本和规模不经济可能降低用电成本，而“一个富裕的工业经济也有利地根本没有中央发电站操作！”
它还指出，“能源存储经常被说成是能收技术的一个重大问题。”但是，一方面由于蓄热比蓄电做同样的任务，更容易，更便宜“对整个...能量储存在软能源经济太大的问题少于一个很难。”所以今天说的市场。
可再生能源降低成本，风险和麻烦;有利于市场主导了政策驱动的通过;并加强个人和社区的选择都已经非常普遍。
The hard path’s political risks sound familiar, too:
"In contrast to the soft path’s dependence on pluralistic consumer choice in deploying a myriad of small devices and refinements, the hard path depends on difficult, large-scale projects requiring a major social commitment under centralized management. ... The hard path, sometimes portrayed as the bastion of free enterprise and free markets, would instead be a world of subsidies, $100-billion bailouts, oligopolies, regulations, nationalization, eminent domain, corporate statism."
The grave vulnerabilities of over-centralized systems, later amplified in "Brittle Power" (1981/82), are also visible.
Other gratifying content from the article includes the utility death spiral, backcasting, integrative design (demonstrated in my house seven years later), institutional barriers and solutions, cogeneration, reliance on market principles and mechanisms, and utilities’ financing customers’ solar systems (athough "solar" in 1976 meant solar-thermal, as photovoltaics were still "exotic").
事情我会改变
文章的主要误差约为天然气。Had the scientific community known in 1976 that U.S. gas is often unassociated with oil, quite abundant, and profitably recoverable from deep and tight formations, I’d have treated it separately from oil, and emphasized natural gas rather than advanced coal as a transitional technique used "briefly and sparingly to build a bridge to the energy-income economy of 2025." These insights weren’t obvious until the past decade.
One of the article’s most controversial claims — that soft and hard energy paths are mutually exclusive — unfortunately has been borne out.
1975采煤的“暂时的和温和的（小于两倍于峰）”扩张结束了在2.16倍由于天然气和煤炭功率的膨胀不自然策略驱动的抑制。（现代联合循环燃气发电厂在上世纪80年代只出现了。）至少挤压效率和可再生能源的石油和天然气楔形的油部分终于得到正在进行的气候保护视力，而煤炭是现在效率，可再生能源和气体之间的挤压。
The article’s most consequential failure was not convincing policymakers to use the power of the U.S. example to slow or stop the spread of nuclear weapons. When I enlarged this argument in Foreign Affairs four years later, it again sank without trace because nuclear advocates dominated most nations’ energy policy, as they still do in many including our own. Thirty years after that, far stronger evidence in Foreign Policy still had little effect. Therefore we worry today about self-inflicted risks from North Korea, Pakistan and Iran.
Deeper lessons
一个文章的最有争议的索赔 - 即软硬能量路径是相互排斥的，因为每一个需要投资，基础设施，机构和态度，抑制或妨碍其他 - 不幸的是已被证实了。它每天是可见的硬技术和软技术的市场份额和政治影响战斗。
在过渡到后化石燃料和气候安全的能源系统受到危险的延误，文章警告说，在1976年，“正是我们可以预期，如果我们继续投入这么多钱，时间，技术，燃料和政治意愿硬盘技术，都如此苛刻他们“。
慢慢地，但与采集速度快，市场已开始战胜现任强制执行其保护旧能源系统的自然欲望的政治手段，而不是启用新的。然而，将加快转变遗体，而气候，公共卫生，安全，发展和民主的迫切需要提高其紧迫性的挑战。
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