Fifty years ago this month — on Oct. 1, 1976 — a relatively obscure academic journal published an article by a little-known physicist that sought to put our country, and indeed the entire planet, on a new and remarkable energy path. If only we had listened more fully.
In his article, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken,” published in the Fall 1976 issue of Foreign Affairs, Amory B. Lovins offered a choice. We could follow the “hard path” and continue to rely on conventional technologies and giant generators, or we could switch to a “soft path.”
How quaint that sounds now, in this era of “energy dominance” as proclaimed by our current president. The “soft path” Lovins envisioned would have taken us away from nuclear power and fossil fuels in favor of “smaller, far simpler supply systems entailing vastly shorter development and construction time, and on smaller less sophisticated management systems.”
In other words, Lovins thought we should turn to renewable energy, small-scale facilities, and devices that produce electricity close to where it is consumed. And Lovins was — and is — an outspoken proponent of energy efficiency. He would later refer to energy efficiency as not just a free lunch but “the lunch you get paid to eat.”
Thanks to something one of my predecessors as Consumer Advocate (the legendary Michael Holmes) did a long time ago, we feel a special connection to Lovins and his soft path. In 1984, Holmes hired Lovins as an expert witness and brought him to Concord to testify before the Public Utilities Commission.
Lovins urged the PUC not to OK throwing yet more money at Seabrook nuclear power plant, then still under construction under the aegis of Public Service Company of New Hampshire as majority owner. Lovins recommended investing instead in “negawatts” — energy efficiency.
“We find that Mr. Lovins’ proposal is not to be preferred over the continued construction of Seabrook Unit 1,” the PUC ruled. “The difficulty we have with Mr. Lovins’ analysis is that it is dependent on new technologies which have not been proven in the marketplace and because we do not believe that sufficient conservation capacity will be developed to meet the needs of the company in the early 1990s.”
Oopsie. Four years later, Seabrook (which did not go online until 1990) had made PSNH the first electric utility in the U.S. since the Great Depression to seek bankruptcy protection. Talk about a technology that had not been “proven in the marketplace”!
Today we have the statewide, ratepayer-funded NHSaves energy efficiency programs administered by the state’s electric and gas utilities. They embody the soft path, as they have throughout the 21st century.
Nevertheless, proponents of the hard path persist. Here in New Hampshire, love is in the air when it comes to the development of new nuclear power plants.
Nobody is talking about anything on the scale of Seabrook, which churns out 1,200 megawatts of power — almost all the time — on behalf of its owners at the Florida-based energy behemoth NextEra. That, by the way, would be the same NextEra that wants to merge with Dominion Energy, which happens to own the only other nuclear power plant in New England — Millstone in Connecticut.
Instead, the emphasis is on so-called “small modular nuclear.” It’s a great idea for small-ish scale, no-carbon-emitting power, generated by reactors small enough to be rolled off an assembly line and moved around via tractor-trailers when refueling is necessary. The problem is that, so far, the technology is unproven and it will be expensive for first-movers.
Meanwhile, the PUC is about to take up the latest three-year plan for NHSaves. An emerging feature is “active demand response” — not measures that use less energy (like heat pumps and LED lightbulbs) but programs that shift demand away from times when energy is expensive.
That’s great, soft-path stuff, but we could do so much more. In 2022, the Legislature imposed strict limits on the NHSaves budget. It was a legislative bargain whose purpose was to overrule a November 2021 order of the PUC announcing a complete phase-out of ratepayer-funded energy efficiency programs.
Notably, that 2021 order was issued under the signature of a departing PUC chair, three hours after the close of business on her last day in that job. Her next gig was leading the administrative office of the state’s courts and her name, Dianne Martin, will be familiar to those following the ongoing scandal that has been consuming the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
We’re still recovering from the damage wrought by the Martin PUC to the NHSaves programs. The General Court should lift the artificial constraints on the NHSaves budget and get us back to investing in all cost effective energy efficiency.
New Hampshire should also consider having an independent entity, and not utilities, administer ratepayer-funded energy efficiency programs. That’s how it works in Maine and Vermont, with great success.
Lovins began his 1976 essay by musing about the two energy paths, soft versus hard, the U.S. might follow “over the next 50 years — long enough for the full implications of the change to start to emerge.”
Those implications, through bankruptcy and electric industry restructuring and now via an affordability crisis and the yearning for a nuclear renaissance, are indeed clear in 2026. Amory Lovins was right all along, and the soft path is the correct path.
Attorney Donald M. Kreis is the state’s Consumer Advocate, representing the interests of residential utility customers.