'Unstoppable force' of solar power propels world to 40% clean electricity

Exponential growth is unintuitive. More than a full percentage point was added last year and that will continue to accelerate. Even the IAE is predicting 14% share by 2030 and they have underestimated solar for the last 10 years now

My comment perceptually, exponential growth looks like bring hit by a wall. It's nothing at all until it is. It'll be 1%. And in a while it double. And double a again. And again. And each doubling is the same amount of time between them.

We're close to production of solar and wind exceeding recent growth in energy demand. When that happens it'll start cratering oil and gas demand.

The question is when it starts looking more like an S-curve. That’s hard to predict because it depends on energy storage.

> They have underestimated solar for the last 10 years now

That is an incredibly large understatement. They have gotten it shamefully and fundamentally wrong year after year.

https://i.redd.it/zz9p8ekoss7d1.jpeg

Since there will be so much solar installed it's quite inevitable that energy storage will be also growing on a lagging but similar exponential curve. Solar is becoming big, and if a major impediment is storage which is not a hard problem like fusion to solve, there will be tons done to bring it into reality.

Even if the current solutions are inadequate, the same was true for PV 20 years ago, it just needed investment in R&D. Investment in R&D of grid storage is at the highest in history, and growing.

That's driven by a combination of cost/pricing and innovation. We're nowhere close to the limits of either battery or solar technology. We're looking at decades of further innovation, learning effects, etc. Assuming anything else would probably be a mistake. Many respectable reporting on energy falls into the trap of being too conservative. E.g. the IEA is a repeat offender on this. Many of their estimates for decades ahead get overtaken within years of being issued.

The real question is at what relative cost level it turns into an S-curve. Right now renewables are mostly cheaper than non renewables and transitioning to a lot cheaper. A lot might turn into one or more orders of magnitude. Where does it stop? Two? Three?

What's the ultimate cost of a mwh of power? It's probably a lot lower than what people currently pay. Renewables have a bit of upfront cost but the marginal cost of using the equipment is close to zero.

Lower cost of energy opens up new use cases and drives the market up. Basically it causes people to electrify more things. Even things that we currently think of as too costly. As those things get electrified, they get cheaper. And there are people that make the investment and benefit and people that don't and get pushed out of the market.

the calculations i’ve seen around storage seemed to indicate that we were not going to be able to meet the demand with batteries anytime soon except with stuff like pumped storage

That graph looks like willful ignorance.

And feels like a spiritual relative to the Itanium sales forecast chart:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Itanium_Sales_Foreca...

It's like I've always said about self driving cars. Self driving cars always seem around 5 years away, until suddenly they're 6 months away. There's no in between. We're seeing that with Waymo.

It's really hard to model unknown unknowns, most models for photovoltaic 20 years ago never predicted the current state but here we are.

Current grid storage technology is a few breakthroughs away, we just don't know when it will happen but given the amount poured into R&D for it, the willingness of governments, and technological hurdles that are orders of magnitude lower than fusion I don't see why we can't expect it to become reality in the next 10 years.

As I said, it's lagging the curve of solar adoption, China has invested a lot in solar for their own power needs as an oil-poor country, their options are renewables and uranium, with the EV industry booming in China, solar being widely adopted, I don't see why they couldn't be at the forefront of grid storage as well in a few years (5-10).

Not everything that grows quickly is exponential. What evidence specifically do you have that the growth is proportional to the already existing capacity? Or even that it will continue to accelerate?

A counterpoint: the recent quick growth has been fueled by panels getting cheaper. They used to be the majority of the cost. But that's not true anymore. The cost will soon be mainly installation (i.e. labor) and space. Neither are amenable to drastic further decreases.

Fortunately we've already reached the point where it's the cheapest option, so that it will continue to replace other power sources even if it does get much cheaper anymore.

Seems like we should be building fission now while waiting for those prospective battery breakthroughs - I think the gap between current storage/$ and where we need to be to build out renewable 100% is absolutely massive. We shouldn't be fully banking on it closing to achieve climate goals.

It looks like they may have some official methodology that may not be changed for political type reasons?

There are potential solutions without needing much cheaper batteries. If you over provide solar by 2x or 4x it may be good enough to cover much of the winter with batteries only needed for a short period overnight. Also the excess may get used for things like making hydrogen or aluminium.

some history

Kurzweil 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYpoKYY1uy4

researchgate 2018 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Exponential-growth-in-so...

some 2024 data https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulfbrowning_exponential-pv-...

and on it goes at about 25% per year. That would have it covering all our needs in about 15 years.

For comparison with Hinkley C the UKs new nuclear reactor the site was selected in 2010 and the latest is "£41.6–47.9 billion in 2024 prices, with Unit 1 planned to become operational in 2029 to 2031."