If the development of solar power can maintain the same (exponential) growth rate it has for the past decade, it could supply all of mankind's projected electricity demands 26 years from now.
The photovoltaic (PV) solar electricity market has shown an impressive 33% growth per year since 1997, with market support programs as the main driving force (source: ‘PV solar electricity industry’ by Winfried Hoffman). According to the Earth Policy Institute solar energy is the ‘world’s fastest growing energy source’.
Due to economies of scale solar power technologies get less costly as people use and buy more as manufacturers increase production to meet demand. The cost and price is expected to drop in the years to come vis a vis the price/performance relationship that Ray Kurzweil often discusses.
The main hurdle to solar energy being truly competitive at the moment is its high cost relative to fossil fuel energy but, as just mentioned, solar technology is benefitting from the fastest acceleration of any energy industry in the history of man. Solar technology, like computer technology, is information driven (a photovoltaic cell shares many aspects with microchips including the use of silicon). Development occurs through many incremental steps of innovation building on previous innovation. It is exponential and chaotic. Invention, or novelty, within information technology is akin to small perturbations in a dynamic system that cascade into enormous paradigm shifts, essentially a butterfly effect of accelerating innovation. The trend of growth from the invention of the transistor to the emergence of the modern internet is a potent example. Kurzweil famously called this the law of accelerating returns. This trend is a powerful phenomenon that is often overlooked when the potential of solar power is considered.
Kurzweil noted in ‘The Singularity is Near’ that:
‘…once we have MNT (molecular nanotechnology) based manufacturing, we will be able to produce solar panels (and almost everything else) extremely inexpensively, essentially at the cost of raw materials, of which inexpensive carbon is the primary one. At an estimated thickness of several microns, solar panels could ultimately be as inexpensive as a penny per square meter. We could place efficient solar panels on the majority of human-made surfaces, such as buildings and vehicles, and even incorporate them into clothing for powering mobile devices. A 0.0003 conversion rate for solar energy should be quite feasible, therefore, and relatively inexpensive.’
The molecular foundry at Lawrence Berkley already holds numerous patents for its work in developing new technologies and techniques for nano-engineered production of highly efficient and inexpensive flexible solar cells. Following this several companies have developed nanoparticle inks that can be sprayed onto flexible substrates to form layers of semiconductor. A solar panel can simply be printed onto a roll of thin foil. These processes don’t need traditional vacuum chambers, and in many cases they can even use conventional printing equipment.
‘The real innovation is that we’re trying to move the photovoltaics industry from the economics of the semiconductor business to the economics of the printing business.’ -Erik Straser, MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures, investor in Nanosolar Inc.
The bottom line is that there remains a great deal of work and research to be accomplished before such grandiose claims of solving all the worlds energy can become practical realisations. The benefits of solar energy are clear though, it’s clean, it would be extremely liberating in terms of taking us away from our dependency on big centralised government controlled power stations and grids, and it’s sustainable with a figuratively inexhaustible supplier via the Sun. So, if the current trend of growth in solar technology continues the future could look very bright, after all there’s around 89 petawatts of energy from the Sun hitting us every day.
More info, including a more detailed look at production capacity according to a logarithmic scale, at: http://entropyproduction.blogspot.com/2007/05/glit tering-future-of-solar-power.html
See Nokia Morph Concept Post for Nanoscale Solar Power: http://robertenderby.blogspot.com/2008/02/nokia-morph-mobile-concept.html
Source: http://www.kurzweilai.net/mindx/frame.html?main=/mindx/show_thread.php?rootID%3D141003
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