What will the world be like in 2020?

[billvon]

billvon, I had the impression that funding RE was more empty gesturing - appeasing the loudest voices on the climate problem, that tended to be 'green' (and reinforcing perceptions the climate issue was about appeasing unreasonable 'green' demands) - than any genuine, deep commitment to decarbonising. But I admit to being cynical.

Perhaps not a surprise that RE could be made to work at low cost to those involved in trying - scientists, engineers - or even that for a lot of people it looked more genuine than it did to me, much as I wanted it to work, but to those funding it, who almost certainly had energy industry experts telling them such options wouldn't work it must have been unexpected that RE would become the most built kind of energy by the early 2020's.

Yeah, starting around 2005, the rate of installation of solar-PV has outstripped any of the predictions for it. There are now massive non-subsidized utility scale solar farms that are winning bids at under 2 cents/kwhr. I think that's due to three things:

1) Pure research funding that enabled production of higher efficiency cells
2) Funding for installations that caused a larger market to appear, and drove efficiencies of scale
3) After the inflection point (payback in under 10 years) natural demand for the "free energy" available from solar-PV.

 

[DaveC426913]

Wut da heck kinda Y-axis is dat??

(Sunuvagun it is logarithmic... didn't look it at first)

 

[Ken Fabian]

As someone with rooftop solar the notion that it will top out above total demand and not even Jevon can keep up and a lot sooner than many people might expect - especially in sunny parts of the world, where lots of people live - starts to look surprisingly reasonable.

The exponential curve turns out being sigmoid - an S-curve. No getting to infinity and beyond - or in this case below zero cost.

The addition of batteries, in our case, more batteries, has boosted PV effectiveness immensely. Grid-wise here in Australia batteries with existing solar (and wind) are currently grabbing more of the investment funding but I think that will prove to be a short-lived 'correction' and the solar/wind plus batteries combination will see a lot of near to medium term growth. Saturation starts having an impact and better sooner than later.

When more than a third of homes already have PV, each making a lot more electricity than they use, barring (shrinking) short periods of time, and the leftovers are contributing above 15% of total grid supply, the potential to top out starts looking real. New installation and upgrade rates are currently still growing fast but that can't persist forever and must inevitably stall and turn to replacement.

Permitting is easy here - no more than an online form done by installers with minimal charges and a few days for approvals that are rarely denied, with the possibility of an inspection for safety.

If Industry cannot innovate to take advantage of periodic abundance of very low cost - effectively free -electricity there is something going wrong.

 

[sandman123]

By 2020?

There will not be any colonies on the moon or Mars any time in the forseeable future. There will not even be a manned mission to Mars before 2020.

3D VR and 5000 people/server may be possible. I won't try to predict how far computers will advance.

World War 3 will not occur, but there will be lots of little wars.

Family planes will never happen.

If you look back the past 16 years - i.e. to 1988 - there hasn't been much change except in electronics. Don't expect a Jetsons future in the next 16 years.

mars is not that far away imo