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Comment by mjamesaustin | Hacker News Reader

It's a false assumption that technological progress happens automatically or even that it's based upon the passage of time.

Progress happens as a result of many choices made by individuals to invest time and energy solving problems. Why is solar rapidly improving now? Because way more people are invested in making it better.

Nascent technologies almost always face an uphill battle because they compete against extremely optimized legacy technologies while themselves having no optimization at first. We only get to the current rapid period of growth because enough people pushed us through the early part of the S curve.

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Sure, that makes sense. This is where I'm coming from with my interest in history:

I heard an interesting argument somewhere that solar cells are an ideal manufactured good. Whether you are building a module for a calculator or a GW scale plant, the modules are the same. This is fundamentally different for steam turbines. On the "concrete-internal combustion engine" spectrum of complexity, solar modules are closer to concrete and turbines are closer to ICEs.

Shouldn't this have led to a special interest in advancing solar module research? Or widespread understanding that eventually the unique set of attributes that define a solar module would lead to it's takeover of a significant portion of global energy generation? Shouldn't that have been apparent from the earliest days of photovoltaic research as a sort of philosophical truth before the advances in material science, extraction or manufacturing of the last fifty years?

I think another important part is that solar has low minimum useful quantities and customization. Lots of the problem with nuclear power is that you only need ~100 to power the US, and each one takes years to build, so getting scale is basically impossible. With a 50-100 year lifespan per plant, that means you only get to build 1-2 a year, and you can't learn much from the 5 you've most recently started since they're still under construction.

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