In the meantime, it appears that the prophets of an age of renewable energy following Peak Oil got things backwards. We may be living in the era of Peak Renewables, which will be followed by a very long Age of Fossil Fuels that has only just begun.Of course...this is most likely wrong in predicting the future. My bet on the 50-years out future is that Solar energy, with efficiencies increasing with silicon chips crosses the fossil fuel cost barrier in 20 +/- 10 years...and in 50 years, fossil fuels will be hopelessly expensive forms of energy as compared to cheap solar. Of course, I too am wrong...but that's because 50 years is a metric ass-ton of time in innovation cycles...and something else will likely displace solar as even better.
Friday, June 3, 2011
In case no one was watching...
Energy scarcity as a physical constriant just died:
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4 comments:
So what becomes scarce? Land for solar panels?
So what becomes scarce?
Maybe phosphorus.
If I'm doing the full Julian-Simon, which I normally am...the question of scarcity is effectively never about physical resources. Following Simon: We are subject to only 2 resource constraints in the medium-long term:
1. Sane government policy.
2. Innovation.
If I go full-Drexler on top of this, I'm personally predicting that computing power/innovation becomes unscarce somewhere before 2050...which makes sane government policy the only constraint on growth.
Honesty solar cell efficiency is not important at all. It's all about dollars/watt, not watts/m^2. And no you can't get fewer dollars/watt by making them more efficient (more efficiently yes).
With photovoltaic one runs in to the 80/20 rule very fast, 40% efficient cells are orders of magnituide more expensive to build than 20%, which are about 8 times more expensive than 12%...
The future of solar photovoltaics is in low efficiency (5-8%) panels that are cheap to build, using organic dyes that can be screen-printed at will.
Oh and if you hadn't noticed, the cost of panels was dropping t a rate of 50% every 10 years. I say WAS because as soon as the .gov started subsidizing them the price levelled off.
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