During1979–2002, Mr. Lovins worked as a team with Hunter Lovins, his wife 1979–99—a lawyer, sociologist, political scientist, and forester. They shared a 1982 Mitchell Prize, a 1983 Right Livelihood Award, often called the “alternative Nobel Prize,” the 1999 Lindbergh Award, and Time’s 2000 Heroes for the Planet Award. In 1989 he won the Onassis Foundation’s first DELPHI Prize, one of the world’s top environmental awards, for their “essential contribution towards finding alterntive solutions to energy problems.” That contribution included the “end-use / least-cost” redefinition of the energy problem (in Foreign Affairs in 1976)—asking what quantity, quality, scale, and source of energy will do each task in the cheapest way. This economically based approach first permitted successful foresight in the competitive energy-service marketplace. In 1993 he received the Nissan Prize for inventing superefficient ultralight- hybrid cars (www.hypercar.com), to which ~$10 billion has been committed, and in 1999, partly for that work, the World Technology Award (Environment). He also received the 2000 Happold Medal of the [UK] Construction Industry Council, the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal of the [UK] Royal Society of Arts, and in 2007, honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects.

In 1982, the Lovinses cofounded Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent, entrepreneurial, nonprofit applied research center. He is now its Chairman and Chief Scientist. The ~60 staff foster the efficient and restorative use of natural and human capital to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining. RMI’s ~$8-million annual revenue is mainly earned by programmatic enterprise such as private-sector consultancy; the rest comes from grants and gifts. He cofounded, led, spun off, and in 1999 sold (to the Financial Times group) E SOURCE, the premier source of information on advanced electric efficiency (www.esource.com).

Mr. Lovins led the energy design for RMI’s headquarters, whose ~99% savings in space- and waterheating energy (to –44°C or –47°F) and ~90% in home electricity paid back in ten months with 1983 technology. An $18-million utility experiment he cofounded and –steered in the 1990s, PG&E’s “ACT2,” validated his claim that very large energy savings could cost less than small or no savings, e.g. in houses comfortable with no air conditioner at up to +46oC (+115°F) yet costing less to build. He founded and chairs RMI’s fourth spinoff, the engineering firm Fiberforge, Inc. (www.fiberforge.com), and is RMI’s lead practitioner—lately helping redesign $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors—in implementing for major firms the tenets of Natural Capitalism (www.natcap.org), which shared the 2001 Shingo Prize (Research), the “Nobel Prize for Manufacturing.” In 2004, he led a Pentagon-cosponsored synthesis of how to eliminate U.S. oil use, led by business for profit (www.oilendgame.com).

Mr. Lovins’s clients have included Accenture, Allstate, AMD, Anglo American, Anheuser-Busch, Bank of America, Baxter, Borg-Warner, BP, Bulmer, Carrier, Chevron, CIBA-Geigy, CLSA, Coca-Cola, ConocoPhillips, Corning, Dow, Equitable, GM, Hewlett-Packard, Interface, Invensys, Lockheed Martin, Mitsubishi, Monsanto, Motorola, Norsk Hydro, Prudential, Rio Tinto, Royal Ahold, Royal Dutch/Shell, Shearson Lehman Amex, STMicroelectronics, Sun Oil, Texas Instruments, UBS, Wal-Mart, Westinghouse, Xerox, major real-estate developers, and over 100 utilities. Public-sector clients have included OECD, UN, Resources for the Future, the Australian, Canadian, Dutch, German, and Italian governments, 13 states, Congress, and the U.S. Energy and Defense Departments.

Mr. Lovins has briefed 19 heads of state, given expert testimony in eight countries and 20+ states, and published 29 books and several hundred papers, as well as poetry, landscape photography, music (he was a pianist and composer), and an electronics patent. In 1980–81 he served on the U.S. Department of Energy’s senior advisory board, and in 1999–2001 and 2006–07, on a Defense Science Board task force on military energy strategy. In 1984 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science “for his book Soft Energy Paths and many other noteworthy contributions to energy policy,” in 1988, of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2001, of the World Business Academy. Dr. Alvin Weinberg, ex-Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, called him “surely the most articulate writer on energy in the whole world today”; Newsweek, “one of the Western world’s most influential energy thinkers.” Dr. John Ahearne, then Vice President of Resources for the Future, remarked that “Amory Lovins has done more to assemble and advance understanding of [energy] efficiency opportunities than any other single person.” The Wall Street Journal’s Centennial Issue named him among 39 people in the world most likely to change the course of business in the 1990s; Car, the 22nd most powerful person in the global car industry.

An occasional advisor to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mr. Lovins has addressed scores of fora sponsored by such groups as The Engineering Foundation, Association of Energy Engineers, ASHRAE, Society of Automotive Engineers, Royal Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, International Association for Energy Economics, Montreux Energy Forum, Institution of Electrical Engineers, Accenture, Merrill Lynch, Allen & Co., News Corp., Fortune, Forbes, Urban Land Institute, Industrial Development Research Council, American Institute of Architects, Edison Electric Institute, Electric Power Research Institute, CRIEPI, Center for Strategic & International Studies, Hoover and Brookings Institutions, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, Pacific Council, Commonwealth Club, Keidanren, Conference Board, World Economic Forum, Tällberg Conference, TED, FiRE, World Bank, Global Business Network, Highlands Forum, Naval Postgraduate School, Naval War College, NDU, Bundeswehr, Aspen Design Conference, Royal Society, and Royal Society of Arts.