Kurtzweil Says: No Energy Crisis

http://io9.com/#!5766786/ray-kurtzweil-uses-math-to-prove-that-we-have-no-energy-crisis

One of my primary theses is that information technologies grow exponentially in capability and power and bandwidth and so on. If you buy an iPhone today, it's twice as good as two years ago for half that cost. That is happening with solar energy - it is doubling every two years. And it didn't start two years ago, it started 20 years ago. Every two years we have twice as much solar energy in the world.

Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly - we are only a few years away from parity. And then it's going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, even if they don't care at all about the environment, because of the economics.

So right now it's at half a percent of the world's energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it's only eight more doublings before it meets a hundred percent of the world's energy needs. So that's 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we'll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been under way for 20 years.

People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight.

And if this trend continues by 2100 Earth will produce enough energy every day through solar alone to collapse the universe into a black hole!

boy does it sound like Kurtzweil has a grasp on all the nuance driving energy policy.

its like, all we've been waiting for is a clean, safe and resource abundant energy technology to replace coal and oil, which everyone wants to replace anyways.

... whats that?... nuclear what?

This is the kind of gross over generalization that makes me skeptical of everything he says...

Originally posted by King Kandy
This is the kind of gross over generalization that makes me skeptical of everything he says...

Now now, don't become the perpetrator of gross over-generalization. I am sometimes wrong (rarely), but that doesn't mean the other vast majority of the times when I am right, it is automatically discredited. (Yes, I am making jokes.)

If an atheist wanted an modern day "prophet" who was actually right about many of his predictions (specific predictions), then they'd just have to look no further than Kurzweil. Sure, he's been wrong and about a lot of things, but he's also been right about a lot of things. These are not things that are "vague": these are specific predictions based on math.

Based on current trends, there's no foreseeable drop in solar energy progression. Sure, there's going to be something that dams it's progress and the Gartner Hype cycle says market saturation is around 30% for most technologies. Most sources on energy futures (not stocks, but plural for "future" meaning multiple "individual" futures for each technology, but not referring to multiple timelines, but the projection timelines for each individual energy technology: man, I wish I didn't have to explain myself) indicate that it will be a combination of technologies, not solar, not wind, not nuclear, etc. That puts the Gartner's Hype Cycle standard projection within a comfortable margin.

I would love an affordable solar technology to power every individual home. This would require redundancy and batteries. The redundancy could be realized through a fuel cell powered by the electrolysis of distilled/purified water. Sounds far fetched but it's possible within a few years. You just need a large energy giant to push it through, which won't happen. An energy company would be completely relegated to a hardware manufacturer, losing most of it's revenue.