What Will We Do With Our Free Power?
EcoTech Note: Here is another great example of how humans cannot easily grok how prices declining owing to the “learning curve” create astonishing, geometric growth. “In 2023, the world installed 444 gigawatts of new solar photovoltaic capacity, an 80 percent year-on-year jump and more than was cumulatively installed between the invention of the solar cell in 1954 and 2017. Although solar power still provides just under 6 percent of global electricity, its share has nearly quadrupled since 2018, an exponential curve that is expected to continue for some time.”
The Economist magazine observes ‘The next tenfold increase [in solar capacity] will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.’ By the 2030s — not very long from now — solar power will most likely be the largest source of electricity on the planet.”
The knock-on implications of cheap solar are staggering — from high-volumne desalination, to making green cement, to electrolyzing hydrogen from water, and even to powering Casey Handmer’s dream of making synthetic fuels solely from the air!
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