How We'll Power The U.S. In 2035 | Hacker News Reader

How We'll Power The U.S. In 2035

fastcompany.com

6 pointsspidaman4 comments

Anyone who thinks that solar will only double in install base by 2035 hasn't been paying attention. If it is, as the article says, up to 2% now, then by 2035 it should be up to a very large percentage of our current output.

The total amount of solar installed grew by 100% in 2010 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/14/us-energy-solar-id...

The historical rate of growth for solar has been more like 33%. http://solarisforever.com/category/compound-average-growth-r...

Therefore, one has to ask, what is going to change? There are billions of dollars invested in scaling as quickly as possible. Are we going to run out of silicon? Unlikely. Are we going to run out of rare earths? Nope. Are we going to run out of space or demand? Perhaps, but not for a long time. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to google for the sources to back those statements up so that I can make my ultimate point in a reasonable amount of text.

33% growth is doubling in a bit over 2 years. 10 doublings is a factor of 1024. So it is pretty reasonable to think that solar output will be well over 100% of our current output by 2035, and perhaps as much as 2000%.

Solar isn't a baseload power supply so it can't replace other fuel sources (nuclear, coal) without serious improvement in batteries or an electric car revolution with V2G (vehicle to grid) support.

However, wind and solar while not baseload will be critical to our infrastructure and ability to deal with power spikes. Much like hybrid cars today, making a fossil-fuel generator that is specced to your high end of demand is inefficient; you can get by with a lower baseload and very powerful "on-demand" power (solar/wind+batteries).

Are we going to run out of oil to power the extraction, production and shipping of the materials before we get around to doing it? Probably not, but still, the costs go up more and more the later we leave it.

That first graph is almost pointless, I think. The energy densities of the different fuels being compared are vastly different. Therefore, measuring them against each other by mass is irrelevant.

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