The International Energy Agency releases regular reports in which it forecasts the growth of various energy technologies for the next few decades. It’s been astoundingly terrible at forecasting solar energy for some reason. Marvel at this chart:
This is from an article criticizing the IEA’s terrible track record of predictions. The article goes on to say that there should be about 500GW of installed capacity by 2020. This article was published in 2020; a year later, the 2020 data is in, and it’s actually 714 GW. Even the article criticizing the IEA for their terrible track record managed to underestimate solar’s rise one year out!
Anyhow, probably there were other people who successfully predicted it. But not these people. (I’d be interested to hear more about this—was the IEA representative of mainstream opinion? Or was it being laughed at even at the time? EDIT: Zac comments to say that yeah, plausibly they were being laughed at even then, and certainly now. Whew.)
The continuation of the solar cell and battery cost curves are pretty darn impressive. Costs halving about once a decade, for several decades, is pretty darn impressive. One more decade until solar is cheaper than coal is today, and then it gets cheaper (vast areas of equatorial desert could produce thousands of times current electricity production and export in the form of computation, the products of electricity-intensive manufacturing, high-voltage lines, electrolysis to make hydrogen and hydrocarbons, etc). These trends may end before that, but the outside view looks good.
There have also been continued incremental improvements in robotics and machine learning that are worth mentioning, and look like they can continue for a while longer. Vision, voice recognition, language translation, and the like have been doing well.
Anyhow, all of this makes me giggle, so I thought I’d share it. When money is abundant, knowledge is the real wealth. In other words, many important kinds of knowledge are not for sale. If you were a rich person who didn’t have generalist research skills and didn’t know anything about solar energy, and relied on paying other people to give you knowledge, you would have listened to the International Energy Agency’s official forecasts rather than Carl Shulman or people like him, because you wouldn’t know how to distinguish Carl from the various other smart opinionated uncredentialed people all saying different things.
The IEA is a running joke in climate policy circles; they’re transparently in favour of fossil fuels and their “forecasts” are motivated by political (or perhaps commercial, hard to untangle with oil) interests rather than any attempt at predictive accuracy.
The International Energy Agency releases regular reports in which it forecasts the growth of various energy technologies for the next few decades. It’s been astoundingly terrible at forecasting solar energy for some reason. Marvel at this chart:
This is from an article criticizing the IEA’s terrible track record of predictions. The article goes on to say that there should be about 500GW of installed capacity by 2020. This article was published in 2020; a year later, the 2020 data is in, and it’s actually 714 GW. Even the article criticizing the IEA for their terrible track record managed to underestimate solar’s rise one year out!
Anyhow, probably there were other people who successfully predicted it. But not these people. (I’d be interested to hear more about this—was the IEA representative of mainstream opinion? Or was it being laughed at even at the time? EDIT: Zac comments to say that yeah, plausibly they were being laughed at even then, and certainly now. Whew.)
Meanwhile, here was Carl Shulman in 2012:
“One more decade until solar is cheaper than coal is today...”
Anyhow, all of this makes me giggle, so I thought I’d share it. When money is abundant, knowledge is the real wealth. In other words, many important kinds of knowledge are not for sale. If you were a rich person who didn’t have generalist research skills and didn’t know anything about solar energy, and relied on paying other people to give you knowledge, you would have listened to the International Energy Agency’s official forecasts rather than Carl Shulman or people like him, because you wouldn’t know how to distinguish Carl from the various other smart opinionated uncredentialed people all saying different things.
The IEA is a running joke in climate policy circles; they’re transparently in favour of fossil fuels and their “forecasts” are motivated by political (or perhaps commercial, hard to untangle with oil) interests rather than any attempt at predictive accuracy.
OH ok thanks! Glad to hear that. I’ll edit.
What do you mean by “transparently” in favour of fossil fuels? Is there anything like a direct quote e.g. of Fatih Birol backing this up?