• Lovins on nuclear power: “One needn’t argue about whether it’s proliferative or unsafe or whether we know what to do with the waste if there’s no point building it because it’s a money loser…. If you built a new nuclear plant you would actually be making global warming worse than it should have been, because you are buying a lot less solution per dollar.”
• On UK’s approval of Hinkley Point C: “I’m afraid that and any other reactors built in the UK – although I don’t think they’re very likely – will simply be one of those other great money-wasting projects we wished we never heard of but nobody had the guts to stop.”
• On UK energy policy: “There really isn’t a coherent policy to discuss. It’s simply analogous to the progress that a sleigh might make in the winter if you hitched a half dozen horses to random points on the periphery and let it move about according to which horse is hauling harder at the time.”
• On Germany’s Energiewende: “On the whole the Energiewende has been terrific for German industry and energy security and economics, and for the world, because it so got China’s attention that China started scaling massively in the building of solar and wind power and other renewables, and thus brought the price down for everybody in the world, and therefore triggered the global energy revolution that’s now well underway.”
• On influence of Trump on US energy mix: “Keep calm and carry on, not much will change, there will be a great deal of rhetoric and litigation and policy conflict, but the underlying market forces are so powerful they’re not about to get diverted by short term politics.”
• On future of US energy mix: “Renewables will continue to accelerate, because they’re the best buy on the supply side.” 
• On energy efficiency and the “negawatt” revolution: “There is an enormous amount more to be done: we could improve the efficiency of US buildings by 2050 at historically reasonable rates by a factor of three or four, with about a 33% internal rate of return.”
• On carbon removal: “I haven’t yet seen an economically attractive CCS option…I think the way forward on carbon removal from the atmosphere is going to be through more biologically informed farming, forestry, grazing practices and so on, to stop treating soil like dirt, start treating it as a biotic community and take carbon out of the air and put it back in tilth where it belongs.
• On critics of renewables: “The main barriers to large scale reliable renewable deployment are really between the ears of people who think that the way we used to run the grid is the only way to run the grid….Many people who have succumbed to the base load myth, that you need the big coal, nuclear gas plants to keep the lights on, simply are not grasping the level of innovation that’s already come to grid operations on both the supply and demand side.”
• On the “hypercar”: “We’re very pleased with how that’s going. It means that you can deploy electric cars much faster, because if you take out about half or two thirds of the weight and drag, you need two or three times fewer of the costly batteries or fuel cells.”
• On replacing coal plants with gas plants: “The more we look in detail at the methane escaping from the gas supply chain and around it where they tend not to count around the edges, the more we get worried that actually gas is worse than coal from a climate perspective.”

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Jocelyn Timperley