Comments on: Clean Energy Growth Projections Soooooo Off Back in 2000

By: mds

mds — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 04:03:00 +0000

Why is Jigar Shah so unperturbed about the possibility of Mitt Romney representing the fossil interests over solar in the White House next term?

We’re at the tipping point. It doesn’t matter. It will actually be intertaining to watch Mitt try to repeatedly kill solar and fail. How will he explain this to his wealthy fossil fuel masters? A new order is emerging.

By: mds

mds — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 03:51:00 +0000

Zach,
You had it the first time: nonlinear growth (actually exponential nonlinear growth in the case of PV) is the reality, but all analysts, being human, will try to force a more linear model. Human psychology is predisposed to thinking in terms of linear changes, not exponential. (Malcolm Gladwell points out this interesting little fact in “the Tipping Point”. There’s another interesting linking of concepts there for you, since we are now at the “tipping point” for PV.)
Please don’t fall into the “it’s complicated” non-sense you have at the end. I hate that phrase. It’s used when a subject becomes inconvenient to discuss honestly because there are conflicting political views and strong biases associated with them. Look at any plot of the growth in PV panel product, or of PV installations, they are growing exponentially. All predictions of PV growth based on linear models will continue to be wrong. This is because PV is a new technology that is continuing to fall in price, while incumbent fossil fuel energy sources remain expensive. As another has pointed out here, this results in an exponentially increasing customer demand. This very much parallel to cell phones replacing land-line phones and btw opening up new markets in many other countries. IT IS THAT SIMPLE. The questions you have down and the whole “it’s complicated” thing are just noise. It is actually not complicated. You just have to be able to see that exponential growth is the reality.
Global solar PV production and installations will be over 0.5 TW annually by 2020. A huge amount compared to current annual total global human power use of 11-12 TW annually. How common are cell phones now? Bet on it!
Solar PV production/installation has been more than doubling every two years since what? …2002? I predict the pull-back in growth will be short lived, while newer PV tech companies kill-off older PV tech companies, and then the new market leaders will take off again, just like before.
>0.5 TW in 2020!
Nice article!

By: mds

mds — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 03:12:00 +0000

Bob and Sola,
I respectfully suggest you are both wrong. The accelerated drop in solar prices is a recent effect. The exponential increase in PV panel production and analyst underestimates were already a regular occurrence. This is important when considering the generally predicted slow down in the rate of PV growth over this decade. I predict a quick return to the same high rates of growth we had last decade. …this time in spite of most government policies. We are at the economic tipping point and that means…

By: mds

mds — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 03:03:00 +0000

Maybe policy was an important factor last decade not this one. In fact USA policy continues to favor fossil fuels over solar and solar continues to grow anyway.

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 20:22:00 +0000

Clearly groups like the EIA missed the call on the dropping price of solar panels.

Everyone did.

By: billtoe

billtoe — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:48:00 +0000

When I read this article, I thought “how do you write an article like this without talking about policy”. The main reason that the IEA predictions are so far off is because they assume NO policy change in their prediction models. They do this on purpose, as in they are trying to predict what will happen with no policy changes (NOT what is actually going to happen). Guess what.. Policies have changed a lot since 2000. Duh!

In any case, I went to look at the original article and it didn’t mention policy either. HOWEVER, I noticed an update link on the original article and followed that. Guess what.. The update talks all about *policy*. People should read that as well to understand that whole picture.

By: sola

sola — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 19:20:00 +0000

I believe the analists regularly underestimate the demand growth response to installation prices getting cheaper.
This may be particularly true for solar PV where the prices have decreased very sharply and demand went up exponentially.

By: Jeff King

Jeff King — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:40:00 +0000

This article brings me hope that the 2020 predictions are under valuing what is possible and that we may see huge leaps in solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources

By: Dimitar Mirchev

Dimitar Mirchev — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:22:00 +0000

Excellent article!

One should look at the yearly forecast made by DOE and IEA and compare them with the actual data.