Understanding Solar Energy

The bit how about incredibly quickly PV has grown is a figurative slap in the face to Vaclav Smil. He had just ten years earlier said PV wasn't going to grow quickly because historically energy replacements took a long time.

https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/scientific...

This retrospective on Smil's predictions four years ago is notable:

https://www.quora.com/Is-Vaclav-Smil-right-in-his-criticisms...

"To get 1 PWh/year of electricity you need to install about 450 GW worth of solar panels. You need dozens of years to acomplish such task. Reality check: 3 years in current speed, in the future probably faster."

Indeed, as the thread top link shows in 2024 the world installed 595 GW of PV.

As John Kenneth Galbraith said, "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."

The IPCC & IEA grossly underestimates PV (and Wind) by any metric for years. Many scenarios assumed costs for 2050 that are already outdated today.

In the same time they overestimate Nuclear Energy and carbon capture by any metric (debatable). It’s getting so bad that there are numerous studies about that problem.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-solar-keeps-being...

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/31/solar-still-largely-u...

https://www.theenergymix.com/leading-climate-models-underest...

https://climatenexus.org/climate-change-news/iea-historicall...

I think a lot this comes down to huge cultural biases. And the two cultures are "hard energy" and "soft energy" folks. Coal, gas, fission, fusion, etc. are all hard energy. Coupled GDP and energy consumption was a core assumption. Renewables, energy efficiency, technological advancement via learning curves all fall under "soft energy".

Most of the energy industry was hard energy because that's what paid everyone's bills. Any estimates that did not cater at least a bit to those biases would just be completely ignored.

But there's another effect too: solar just completely outperforms even the most optimistic assessments. There's one famous solar financial analyst, whose name I'm blanking on, who continues to underestimate even though she knows the effect.