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Comment by isolli | Hacker News Reader

It reminds me of this: https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/866313289306963969/p...

tl;dr The International Energy Agency kept predicting, year after year, in the face of all the evidence, that solar production would plateau.

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We could be at the point where solar adoption takes off exponentially.

On a big picture view:

Tony Seba: Clean Disruption - Energy & Transportation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0

On a more micro level view:

Solar power solutions coming to places with no grid:

https://medium.com/zolaelectric/infinity-smart-grid-deliveri...

It has taken off exponentially. That’s what the growth curve you’re looking at is called. :)

No, it has not taken off exponentially yet in the way the Tony Seba video demonstrates with a picture of 5th Ave in NYC in the year 1900 where there are lots of horses used for transportation, and only one car, compared with a picture of the same street in 1913, where the street is full of cars, and there is only one horse to be found.

Scroll down the page I linked to the graph "Exponential Growth of Solar PV". A straight line on a log graph is exponential by definition.

There's the formal definition of "exponential", and then there is "exponential" in the sense of completely disruptive and transformative as in the example Tony Seba gives. I am referring to the latter.

That's quite impressively wrong from the IEA. I wonder how come.

One of the comments there points it out: The government keeps passing subsidies for solar that nominally expire, then renewing them again before they expire. Then the government's models assume the subsidies expire when the law says they will rather than getting renewed time and again.

If you could predict the future, would you work for the IEA?

At least they're consistent. If linear growth is the only thing they can imagine, then they definitely can't imagine exponential growth.

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