Why everyone missed solar's exponential growth

I think forecasters are scared of exponentials. If they project a linear, for the immediate short term they get better wins. The problem is that planning often maps out 5+ years and if you miss the doubling potential in the explosive growth you basically mis-planned.

People want independence from the billing cycle. With the decline in systems reliability overall, having your own solar "feels" like it helps. That absent batteries it may not, and that it also has causative qualities to the systems reliability isn't material. Its what people feel about it.

The fear in the asset holders over being stranded is huge. Down here in Australia unavoidable systems charges are not the majority of most people's bills, as the semi-hemi-private-regulated market operators rush to get profit out of the capex.

If you can afford to go battery+solar, the cost to unbind from the net is also a huge dis-incentive. Better to stay connected, pay service charge, and find an aggregator to arbitrage your load into a value proposition.

The whole "Chyna is stealing our solar lunch" thing is tiresome. If they want to dump solar panels on the world, I say go for it: The more the merrier.

> So wrong, in fact, that when I recently offered a $1,000 bet on solar’s explosive growth, not a single expert would take me up on it.

Doesn't that mean the forecasters agreed with this gentleman? He bet $1,000 that he is right and nobody wanted to bet against that.

I'll also say that forecasters, by the nature of their role, basically just project status quo forward for whatever their time horizon is. They generally don't have a good vantage point to spot fundamental market shifts. You have to be brave to bet on an exponential trend holding since when they end they end suddenly.

Anything that grows exponentially is going to suffer comically wrong forecasts if over a long enough time horizon, like 3-5 years. It's almost impossible to get the exponent exactly right, and the error grows very quickly.

log log has been a thing for several decades.

I'm going to say that that's accurate when you replace 'forecasters' with 'economists'. It's why things don't change as quickly as they could, because:

- The economic data suggests..

- Economists agree that...

If it relies on history to guess the future, you're mostly going to get history as the result. Somewhat analgous to science progressing on funeral at a time.

Without further reduction in battery costs, this exponential growth will turn linear again.

But why? I feel like I just read an overlong answer to "why did the soccer player miss the goal?" that amounts to "the ball went the wrong way."

What is needed though is the either storage of energy (batteries) or the redistribution of consumption (robot butlers pushing peak evening consumption forward in the day).

I keep feeling a bit of this is how much less energy modern things need over the past. Obviously, industrial use has gone way up. Basics in a household, though, were trending surprisingly down. Modern lights and general entertainment are thankfully low in energy.

The next thing is what's happening in batteries. Solar panels are great, but you need storage to go with them. Battery prices dropped about an order of magnitude over 12 years.[1]

Energy density continues to improve. At some point, one of the half-dozen companies trying to get production cost down for solid-state batteries will probably succeed. That gets about 2x the energy density per unit weight over lithium-ion, plus charging times under 10 minutes. Then fast chargers can replace gas pumps on a one for one basis.

Fixed energy storage doesn't need more density, just lower prices. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are just fine for that. Retail chains with huge flat roofs (Walmart, Target, etc.) are going in heavily for solar and batteries.[2] The power bill for air-conditioning those huge spaces quickly justifies it.

This is now entirely driven by the economics. No more need for subsidies.

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/23807/lithium-ion-battery-pri...

[2] https://electrek.co/2024/11/19/corporate-america-is-investin...

There is also an enormous amount of money tied up in old power, guaranteed profits for companies that run old plants and political games denying climate change and turning the population against renewables.

Nobody wants to predict a future they know will be unpopular and make a lot of people angry.

I.e. when I say you won’t even be able to buy a new ICE vehicle on roughly 10 years people get very confrontational and angry

Working in an investment bank that's build around 800 solar plants over the world in the previous decade with steep competition from a lot of other investors I'd argue that not everyone missed it. The next big boom is in battery storage, but the projects and investments took off a year or two ago with production factories nearing completion. Part of what shot it up was when various EU countries raised their green energy targets from 60-80%. In Germany alone that will require a 800% growth for battery storage financials before 2030.

I'm not sure which semi-professional to professional investors missed that here in Europe though. In fact we've seen so many companies shoot up around these things that the recent economic downturns is causing quite a lot of bankruptcies. Which are then bought up by larger investment funds.

From a tech perspective... There is going to be a lot of potential in building the technical layer between a plant and the "internet". None of the current systems, including market leaders that I'm not going to name drop, aren't very good. Part of the reason is because things like inverters and other solar plant tech has absolutely no standardization. They are ridiculously different, meaning you need actual programmers to onboard each plant unless someone builds some form of engineering standard. Currently it seems like each piece of tech basically has it's software designed by the individual engineer who made it. What is even more hilarious is that the systems made for solar, wind, batteries and so on don't work together.

I'm working in the "plant" to "internet" space you mentioned and seeing this first-hand. Would be very keen to have a chat if you have the time please. Email in bio.

You are right on that. But of course, there is no basis for assuming battery cost won't decrease anytime soon. We're looking at decades of progress coming from material science research, economies of scale and learning effects, entirely new battery chemistries coming to market, etc. Any plan that assumes none of that is going to happen would be pretty weak.

You’re overthinking. It’s just a PR piece

I don't get why people get confrontational about not being able to buy a new ICE vehicle. Who cares about that, if you can buy an electric vehicle with similar performance for the same money? It's actually a superior choice, since you can easily install a charger into your home, while you can't turn your home into a gas station easily.

You'll be able to buy ICE vehicles. But you won't want to and the people that could sell you one will be dealing with the economic effects of most of their customer base evaporating. Mostly poorly probably. Think factory closures, reduced market shares, etc.

But ten years sounds about right for the following things to happen:

- new EVs will be cheaper to buy than ICE vehicles. Right now they are cheaper to own. But once prices drop low enough, few people will want to spend more on a lesser vehicle.

- EV production will ramp up to eclipse ICE vehicle production by the end of this decade. More EVs will be produced than ICE vehicles.

- Commercial fleets will be largely electrical for the simple reason it's already cheaper and only getting cheaper. Anger doesn't factor into this. Businesses that don't adapt will go out of business.

- Private owners will follow but a bit slower. Lots of private owners have older vehicles and don't actually drive that much. So, economic drivers are there but not that important for them.

- For the same reason, roads are actually dominated by commercial traffic. Most miles driven will be electric. Most of the intensively used vehicles will be electric. That will become really visible on the roads. It's already very visible in some places.

- That same effect will also impact revenue from petrol/diesel sales. That's already starting to happen as well. This will impact pricing and availability. Which feeds into decision making.

How can I install a charger for my car in my apartment?

With ICE I can drive to the nearest gas station and be done in 5 minutes. With ICE I don't even think about it, I just drive to a station that's on the way to wherever I'm going

> if you can buy an electric vehicle with similar performance for the same money

It's because you can't.

Electric vehicles cost more. And I personally would never buy an electric vehicle with less than 600 miles range - and even then I would hesitate because I'd have to figure out how to charge at my destination.

Superchargers on the road or whatever don't meet my needs - I'm not willing to wait to charge. I eat in the car, and any rest stop that takes more than 10 minutes is no go for me.

Personally I'd be most interested in a plug in hybrid, with 100 miles (or even less) of battery range. Use battery for city trips and gas for long trips.

> since you can easily install a charger into your home

No you can't. People in apartments can't install them at all, people with only on-street parking can't install them (for example most of New York City is basically without chargers for that reason), and people in houses need some expensive work to run the necessary wires.

Where I live only about 1/4 of the houses on my street (mostly single family) can install chargers - parking is too unpredictable to be able to charge with on-street parking, although some of my neighbors try, and beg other neighbors to not "take their spot".

There's a reason EV sales are dropping.

So, you are the guy exposing us to adverse foreign actors? How would you feel about being charged with treason in a few years?

And I am only half-joking, see https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-p... for the explanation.

> Currently it seems like each piece of tech basically has it's software designed by the individual engineer [...].

> ... There is going to be a lot of potential in building the technical layer between a plant and the "internet"

These two statements are contradictive. What you need here is exactly the opposite of one-more tech-layer.

What you need is not one more bullshit startup that try to bring one-more of its proprietary tech stac to unify them all.

What you need is international standardization and protocols. Exactly like that the IUT is doing in the Telecom domain.

> In Germany alone that will require a 800% growth for battery storage financials before 2030.

Great to see additional public money to be spend to enrich private investors due to the German nuclear phase out. The 400 billions from the Energiewende are indeed not enough when we see the current carbon intensity of the country. #irony

"Everyone missed" and "no one is talking about" are just click baits.

> You'll be able to buy ICE vehicles.

Depends on the country. I think 2035 is a realistic date for an ICE ban for personal vehicles, and I'm willing to bet that several countries will have implemented a ban by then. Norway targets 2025. Netherlands is looking at 2030.

Most other countries are saying 2040, but if EVs become cheap and good enough by 2030 it's not unthinkable that some of them will move up the timeline. Keep in mind that by 2035 we will probably feel the consequences of climate change even more severely. Perhaps we will see a year with practically no polar ice cap in summer. And the 2040 goal may anyway make it so it's practically impossible to buy an ICE personal car by 2035 because what auto-maker or dealership will want to focus at all on a rapidly shrinking market that they know will be completely gone in 5 years? A few sports car and recreational vehicles, maybe? But a car you want to daily drive, probably not.

> That same effect will also impact revenue from petrol/diesel sales. That's already starting to happen as well.

Yeah, this is a very good point that I don't think many are considering. In the area in Norway with highest EV share the sale of gasoline started falling 30% every year. I've seen gas stations change all but 1-2 pumps to charging stations recently.

That's why I think the last few years of this transition may see larger fall in sale of ICE vehicles than you'd expect from a gradual transition, as people who would otherwise have bought a new ICE vehicle may try harder to hold on to their old one.. because why buy a brand new car that's going to be extremely inconvenient to fuel in a few years? Even if EV prices go up to due spike in demand caused by this panic, people may still hesitate to buy ICE.

By the tail end of this, people may be reading news from Norway and Netherlands that you can't easily find gas stations anymore.. We've got lots of German tourists coming by car in Norway. That could make Germans think even if they don't have their own ban.

All that said, this all depends on whether we can make enough batteries. That's a huge challenge. There are many multi GWh factories being constructed now. But still.. there could be limitations on say lithium mining. So perhaps we need Sodium-Ion to go mainstream for the really low cost vehicles.

The linked article actually raises a very interesting point about how solar panel manufacturers' management apps, which mostly operate through server backends they control, have enabled them to acquire very significant, yet currently unregulated (in the Netherlands) control over many gigawatts of electricity, without anyone really noticing. It argues that this should be much more heavily regulated.

But I almost didn't read it, because of the insane accusation of treason in the parent post.

I’m curious what ICE vehicle you drive now that has a 600 mile range?

> Great to see additional public money to be spend to enrich private investors due to the German nuclear phase out. The 400 billions from the Energiewende are indeed not enough when we see the current carbon intensity of the country. #irony

As the nuclear plants were also owned and operated by private investors, I don't see why the German people shouldn't be allowed to say that they don't want nuclear power in their backyard. This certainly set back the climate goals of the country as did Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine.

400 bn EUR is indeed not a lot if you consider that it was spent to be part of an effort to kickstart solar and wind industries. Which worked and delivered a downward trajectory for LCOE which put solar, wind and soon batteries on the map.

> I don't see why the German people shouldn't be allowed to say that they don't want nuclear power in their backyard.

Did they ? https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/two-thirds-germans-agai...

> 400 bn EUR [...] Which worked and delivered a downward trajectory for LCOE which put solar, wind and soon batteries on the map.

400bn€ represents 26 European pressured nuclear at the current Olkiluoto cost . With 1.6GW per reactor, so around 42.6GW of raw stable power for Germany. Almost 70% of the entire freaking German consumption.

Considering the installed Hydro and solar capacity, the entire electricity production would be de-carbonated at ~80% in Germany if this amount would have been spent on Nuclear instead of masturbation.

> it was spent to be part of an effort to kickstart solar and wind industries

Sorry. You meant spent on importing Chinese produced solar panels and a bankrupting Siemens wind power ?

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/siemens-energy-revie...

@ars is not saying that; @ars is stating a minimum range threshold to buy an Electric Vehicle (EV).

I completely understand why would someone have such a threshold in USA.

For example, a round trip starting and finishing from/to a place that is a few hundred miles away from a big city. With ICE vehicle fueling during the trip is not a no-brainer. With EV, charging during the trip would take non-trivial planning if EV's range is, say, 300 miles. With 600 miles range it is easy -- just do it beforehand.

This problem is already solved in places with more developed infrastructure:

• Workplaces can have chargers in their parking lots. In places where cars are parked for many hours, slow chargers are sufficient, which makes them relatively cheap and easy to install, so they can be plentiful.

• Malls, supermarkets, gyms, restaurants, etc. can have medium and high power chargers. BEVs need 20-30 minutes to recharge from a high power charger. You can do your weekly shopping while your car recharges.

• Charging posts can be installed along roads with on-street parking. In some places even lamp posts can be modified to have charging sockets.

Modern EVs used for commuting need to be charged only about once a week (BEVs are most efficient in city driving, and the median US commute is 1/10th of good BEVs city range).

With the infrastructure in place, daily use of BEVs is more convenient than ICE, because you never need to go to a gas station. BEVs charge unattended, so you don't even spend the 5 minutes refuelling. You plug your car in and leave to do whatever you wanted to do at the destination you were going to anyway.

> and any rest stop that takes more than 10 minutes is no go for me.

You're pretty uncompromising. There are already BEVs that need 18 minutes to recharge. That's close to a 10-minute rest stop + gas station stop.

In real world scenarios good BEVs are currently about 10% slower on long-range road trips than ICE. Not ideal, but also you can relax a bit and not piss in a hurry.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V6ucyFGKWuSQzvI8lMzv...

> People in apartments can't install [chargers]

You don't need a charger at home for a BEV, but you do need to live in a place capable of building the infrastructure:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42203545

> there's a reason EV sales are dropping.

You've been reading some sensationalized headlines. Outside of short-term fluctuations, only the second derivative of EV sales has been dropping — the rate of growth has slowed down, which means the sales are still going up and share of EVs is growing, just not as quickly as it used to.

Three or four years ago, I would have agreed with your statement about ICE vehicles. Now I question it, at least for the US market. The initial wave of EVs that followed Tesla’s success has ebbed. American manufacturers are dropping, rather than adding EV models. European and Asian manufacturers are not releasing their EV models in the US market (eg VW ID.3), because there’s too little demand. Given all that, I don’t know how the market will reach the critical mass necessary to ensure that charger infrastructure gets built.

jQuery proved that it can be a fully reasonable way to achieve standardization.

Then of course there's the classic xckd about standards. There's no one true way.

> Working in an investment bank that's build around 800 solar plants over the world i

How long does it take a new vertical to reach bankability?

For example, imagine floating ESS giga packs for shipping ports. 80% of the capex are tier 1 battery packs. And a 10 year PPA from the port. And after 1 or 2 FoaKs.

How long before NoaK projects can get 80-20 debt financing with PV-level interest rates?

>Why everyone missed solar’s exponential growth

As someone who follows Kurzweil that seems odd as he predicted it accurately well ahead of time (eg https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/futurist-ray-k... )

For me the more interesting question is why are people in denial about Kurzweil's tech predictions? And this author presumably unaware of them. Even if you personally think the man's a crank, his basic procedure of plotting tech growth on a log scale and doing an extrapolation isn't really rocket science.

And most are still in denial about the singularity/immortality stuff. Prepare for a lot of 'why everyone missed' articles on that in a decade or two. (https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-ray-kurzweil/)

None of this solves the issue of charging at scale. How would you solve a small town of, say, 20 000 people charging for 20-30 minutes at a mall? Note: peak for "weekly shopping" is usually just the weekend.

For on-street parking (and any parking general) it's still a lot of investment in infrastructure, as it's not just hanging an extension cord from your outlet.

> What you need is international standardization and protocols

A: Some form of top-down waterfall-model of standards?

B: Some survival-of-the-fittest standard like WHATWG vs W3C?

C: Standardisation is a fantasy word where government policy is effective at design of engineering systems/APIs?

D: Other solutions (ideally with recent examples in modern industries)

The difficulty with standards is aligning the incentives of producers (countries, companies) with consumers. That's the problem we already have, standardisation just adds extra complexity to that problem.

You're talking in hypotheticals, but Norway has 80%+ market share of BEVs, and quite a few towns with 20,000+ residents. There are already many multi-megawatt charging locations built all around UK and Europe. It's an expensive infrastructure, but when there's demand, it pays for itself. When it's busy, they build more. Growth of the grid is also manageable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfyG6FXsUU

High-speed charging locations that have very uneven usage with peaks, save costs by using dynamic power sharing (so capacity isn't wasted when a car that has finished charging occupies a dispenser), and have battery storage on site to use a cheaper smaller grid connection, and usually also make extra money from power arbitrage.

> it's not just hanging an extension cord from your outlet.

It almost is! For slow (overnight) AC charging the expensive inverter is in the car. The "charger" on the street is just an extension cord with a network-connected switch and a few temperature sensors for safety. BTW, home "chargers" (EVSE) are overpriced. Many of them are literally a Raspberry Pi and some switches.

> You're talking in hypotheticals,

I live in a Stockholm suburb. Any infrastructure investments are met with "it's too expensive" and/or "current infra will not support charging infra".

> High-speed charging locations that have very uneven usage with peaks, save costs by using dynamic power sharing (so capacity isn't wasted when a car that has finished charging occupies a dispenser), and have battery storage on site to use a cheaper smaller grid connection, and usually also make extra money from power arbitrage.

That wasn't my point, is it? High-speed charging locations will be congested exactly because of uneven usage with peaks.

The main issue I have with Kurzweil's predictions is that they assume exponential growth, instead of sigmoid. Exponential growth doesn't really happen in physical processes, eventually they run out of inputs & level off. The hard part of predictions is figuring out where they level off.

Fair enough. I find he mostly tries to stick to the exponential bits and avoid things that are about to level out. Like he focuses on compute per dollar that can run a lot and not on Moore's transistors per unit area which is already getting close to atomic limits.

Where I find him to go off the rails a bit is anything that's not an exponential extrapolation, like I've never really seen the nanobots thing.

This comes two days after, so not sure if you might ever read it.

> "Did they?"

The April 2023 poll reflects a divided opinion under energy cost pressures from Russia’s aggression. One-third opposed extensions, one-third supported them, and one-third favored temporary extensions—hardly a consensus against prior nuclear phase-out decisions made democratically in 2011 post-Fukushima.

> "400bn€ represents 26 European pressured nuclear..."

400bn€ decarbonized over 50% of the grid. This can’t be directly compared to reactor construction alone since nuclear entails significant long-term costs for running, decommissioning and waste disposal. Germany’s nuclear operators already allocated billions for waste storage and disposal (34bn EUR for 17 plants), and it’s unclear if this will suffice as one failed attempt to store nuclear waste temporarily at Asse failed and is projected to cost at lesat 4bn EUR to clean up. Meanwhile, renewables scaled rapidly, avoiding the delays plaguing nuclear projects like Olkiluoto.

My opinion is that Nuclear is already so far behind the cost trajectory of today's solar and wind that it will never recover. Solar will expand by another magnitude and Nuclear will become even more costly.

> "Spent on importing Chinese panels and bankrupting Siemens wind power?"

Chinese dominance in solar manufacturing is relatively new and Europe/Germany squandered their leading role, because they failed their industrial policy in the mid 2010s. China drove cost reductions so steep that over two-thirds of solar costs are now domestic: land, installation, and grid connection. Unlike fossil fuels, solar ensures local economic gains, with China unlikely to profit from solar as the Middle East did from oil. Siemens’ wind issues are a corporate misstep, not a referendum on wind's viability, as it remains crucial for global decarbonization.

Germany’s investment wasn’t a waste — it built a renewable infrastructure capable of rapidly scaling to meet climate goals. Nuclear might offer stability, but it’s slow, costly, and less suited to the urgency of today’s energy transition.