(For the record, I am very bullish on solar power, having worked and consulted in the industry. But I am also grounded enough to realize that the revolution will be gradual, not done in 10 years. 10 years is not much time for something so capital-intensive. It's not like phones or computers.)
I regret even commenting in the first place, because I hate feeding the dynamic of giving attention to poor quality and ill-founded comments. I wish I was discussing something constructive instead.
When the transistor arrives, vacuum tubes are just swept aside despite the fixed costs. Ten years did that, less in fact, I was there. There's a rather extreme threshold effect, once the right price point is passed, the old tech just falls off a cliff. There's a great chart of that happening to Kodak due to digital photography, extremely suddenly, despite all the fixed costs. They were making their best profits one year, staring at death the next. This link is close to the chart I remember seeing. Note the extraordinary difference one year makes! Every mall had a very expensive photo developing plant, then not. Scrap value only. https://macromon.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/creative-destructi... Because solar power effectiveness varies geographically the cliff will be a bit smoother, of course.
Only in a real banana republic could you hold new tech off for a half-century, and you'd need to halt trade to do it.
I'm old, I've seen a lot of change, and tons of valuable things - including large amounts of infrastructure, become valueless very suddenly, not to mention my collection of VCR tapes.
There is such a thing as first-mover advantage, but that applies to new tech not old, so I'm assuming you don't mean to refer to that.
I regret your stooping to vituperation. It wasn't necessary, or accurate.
Let's look at some facts:
* No one in the market agrees that energy will abundant and cheap in 10 years due to solar and batteries becoming far cheaper than natural gas. Natural gas companies have not been shorted to zero. Utilities are continuing to make capital expenditures. Natural gas plants are continuing to be built. Corporations are continuing to sign long-term power purchase agreements with renewable generators that lock in prices for 20 years. Maybe everyone is suffering from a collective delusion, or maybe energy transitions take decades.
* The EIA projects roughly flat energy consumption out to 2040, with natural gas and renewables taking share from coal and nuclear. Hardly abundant.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/0383(2017).pdf
* For natural gas power plants, about 1/3 of the levelized costs are capital costs.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
* There are strong dynamic effects that will slow the transition. As the penetration of solar grows, the non-solar consumption peak will move to night-time and the marginal value of solar falls by about 1/2. Conversely, as natural gas plants shut down, their cost of fuel will fall and the value of their spinning reserve and other ancillary services will rise.
* Building a transmission backbone for new utility-scale solar will take decades. San Diego's Sunrise PowerLink took 5 years of environmental review and construction, for instance:
https://www.irwaonline.org/eweb/upload/web_novdec_12_Sunrise...
* Increasing the supply of large power transformers to build out a new transmission backbone for utility-scale solar will face significant supply constraints:
https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transfor...
* Today no energy storage solution is economical. Probably the solution with the great hope of scale-based cost reductions is batteries. How many batteries would we need? World electricity consumption is about 50,000 GWh per day. If solar displaces natural gas, then for overnight and peak backup, we need storage on that scale.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+electricity+consu...
* Can we hope to even approach producing 50,000 GWh of batteries within 10 years? Global annual production of batteries is around 30 GWh a year right now. There are factories under construction now to bring that up to around 100 GWh around 2020. Given that factories take years to design and build, that means we need to scale lithium production by roughly a factor of 1,000 and scale battery production roughly a factor of 1,000 and get the plans and investment lined up in the next couple years. Is Tesla ready for 1,000 Gigafactories? Absolutely not.
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/l...
Regarding your transistor example - First, according to Wikipedia and Science magazine, the transition was gradual over the 50s and 60s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/05/return-vacuum-tube
Second, the size of vacuum tube industry was never the size of the global energy industry. Building new transistors factories can be done. But building new factories to ramp up to trillions in battery and solar cell production within a single decade is ludicrous.
P.S. I would appreciate it if your comments didn't assert to me 'You're saying' or 'Maybe you're trying to say.' It's more polite if you say 'What I think you are saying is....'
If you don't want to be asked what you're saying precisely, you just have to provide more detail earlier, or at the very least the proper rubrik. I just don't understand the hostility here mixed into factual matters.
There's little to answer in your last post. Your definition of gradual was decades; re solar power it's already been decades, but the actual transitions to new technologies - the mass adoptions - happen quickly - so you're really changing the subject. The first consumer product (radio) to appear in my city with transistors came in the early sixties, at a price of $79 - a fortune then - but only a few years after that, you couldn't buy a regular radio with tubes. The transition was very rapid. Kodak's stock took a long time to fall to earth, but the loss of revenue was sudden, and massive.
Re transmission - solar will strongly tend to be local. Batteries: you can look up discussions of Vanadium batteries (just one novel tech) elsewhere on HN, but note that individual batteries are now being built that are nearly 1GW - so 50,000 GW is very far from impossible - even if that figure turns out to be accurate. Not impossible at 5 cents a watt. Betting that this or that is impossible is usually a bad bet. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium-...
Actually, far larger "batteries" exist - reversible dams, many built only for energy storage purposes. Analogous mass systems have also been proposed using air and salt.
Also, even if Vanadium flow batteries achieve commercial success and drop energy storage costs down to 5 cents a kWh, that's still above wholesale electricity prices of 2-4 cents a kWh:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_mar...
Lastly, the EAI disagrees with your assertion that solar will be local (which I interpret to mean rooftop). It forecasts lower costs and higher volumes for utility-scale installations, which benefit from greater economies of scale.
Trillions of dollars are being invested in infrastructure now - and yes, it is mostly investment into renewables already.
Remember "Quantity has a quality all its own", but what that quality is isn't always easy to tell before you have it.
He'll do this all in a cave of course.