Clayton Christensen had a much more interesting take on solar power at the Business of Software conference: it won't compete with fossil fuels in the US anytime soon (except as a recipient of huge amounts of government largess), because for the most part our energy infrastructure works really, really well. It's ubiquitous, cheap, and mostly doesn't kill you. In much of the world, energy is 0 for 3! This makes e.g. small solar cells just good enough to run a cell phone charging station into revolutionary, disruptive devices in parts of Africa, because they're not competing against a well-developed multi-billion dollar infrastructure, they're competing against "no electricity at all." If they're expensive and fail to work in poor weather and available only spottily and... <i>who cares</i>, some electricity still beats no electricity.<p>His thesis was that if solar ever becomes a big thing in the US it will be because it grew like wildfire on the global periphery until the tech gets mature enough to start peeling off bits around the edges of US consumption (and then implied it might go further than that, using the same disruption mechanic).
That's good news, but no matter how cheap it is, solar only works when the sun shines. The real impediment to a solar/wind economy is energy storage, which is still very expensive and hard to scale.<p>A good post that runs the numbers and conveys the scale of the problem is here:
<a href="http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/" rel="nofollow">http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat...</a><p>And another that takes a close look at wind is here:
<a href="http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/10/29/gws-sg-es/" rel="nofollow">http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/10/29/gws-sg-es/</a><p>We can definitely use solar for about 20% of our energy, with fossil or nuclear plants backing it up. But until we fix the storage problem, the only route to a post-carbon economy is nuclear.
Krugman's article is not very interesting (at least not by HN standards). It's clear he has his biases.<p>But the HN comments here contain some pretty cool links, which is why I upvoted it.<p>I worked in the renewables space for a little bit and my conclusion was that far too many companies were making political bets, not technological or business bets. Specifically, a lot of business models depended on an extension of Kyoto to the US, which did not happen and is unlikely to happen any time soon. Without that the business models were interesting,but not compelling.<p>Personally, I do believe renewables can replace a significant fraction of fossil fuels, but they have to do it based on cost, not political correctness. I'm not saying that as a normative statement, but as an observation of American politics. There was a brief window of time when carbon could be priced the way environmentalists wanted it to, but that's not going to happen again any time soon.
Krugman, as is his custom, criticizes his political enemies without even knowing their position.<p>From the article: <i>Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives.</i><p>If they are "actively hostile" to alternatives, why did they pass a law subsidizing alternatives?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005</a><p>Also, why are we submitting inflammatory and dishonest pundits to HN, rather than a source that might skip the politics and cover some actual science?
Moore's Law is actually quite ubiquitous. In <i>The Innovator's Dilemma</i> a large number of examples are given of similar trends that lasted for decades, including such things as the volume that a hydraulic scoop could scoop, to the distance that a steam ship could travel without refueling, to the capacity of batteries.<p>It is therefore no surprise that solar power would show a similar trend.
This SciAm article has actual numbers / charts - worth looking at: <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/sm...</a>
<i>We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water</i><p>Yes, some of the runoff is almost five times as radioactive as a banana. I don't mean to say that we shouldn't be concerned about the chemical sin fraking fluids, clearly those are things we should worry about. But raising the specter of radiation here just seems like fear mongering.
"At what cost?" That's the first question anyone should ask about solar (or any other type of energy). Even though prices have fallen, solar is still, by far, the most expensive source of on-grid electricity generation--5 time more expensive than natural gas for example. <a href="http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/levelized-cost-of-new-generating-technologies/" rel="nofollow">http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/leveliz...</a>
One fantastic presentation given at HomeCamp 4 last month was by Moxia. Their angle on this is retrofitting homes to use DC sockets rather than AC (via USB ports and convertible DC cables, so you don't have to carry the brick around with you). They install batteries, an AC/DC transforming battery charger (charging overnight, using off-peak, cheap electricity) and solar panels (presumably wind turbines and other generators can be used too). All with clever management and monitoring integration. The point of this (besides the convenience of having DC sources for everything, and LED lighting) is shifting your power consumption off-peak, and to an extent, offgrid.
Moore's law is the wrong analogy.<p>Computer chips become better every year because they get smaller, use less materials.<p>We could make solar cells thinner, but we can't appreciably reduce the area that they take up. The solar cells need some backing material, brackets to hold them, infrastructure to move the electricity away, security mechanisms so that people can't steal them, and other forms of material that can't be rapidly dematerialized.
It's interesting that he started the discussion with a reminder of externalities, pointing out that the negative externalities from fracking were not properly internalized.<p>I'm surprised he didn't mention the FITs in Europe, and the cheap loans in China. Was he making a singular point of the United States, or did he overlook places where solar is relatively advantaged relative to fossil fuels?
When solar becomes cheaper than the alternatives, the propaganda machine can only slow the adoption, not stop it. The entities that consume large quantities of electricity are mostly unaffected by IQ lowering media transmissions.
<p><pre><code> Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power
falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months
</code></pre>
I stopped reading right there.