Energy Scenarios

If you wrote an article about this at TCS, your link doesn’t go there.

No love for fusion? I don’t have a strong enough physics background to guess how likely either ITER or Polywell is to develop into a commercial power source, but neither feels substantially less likely to me than solar singularity, and the projected best cases for commericalization are 2030 and 2020 respectively, which falls within your timeline.

Here’s some more background:

Many solar manufacturers make their products out of silicon and use machines similar to those used in the chip industry, but solar panel makers won’t be benefiting from Moore’s Law, a phenomenon in the chip industry where power increases as cost go down. Moore’s Law works because reducing the size of microprocessors simultaneously makes them less expensive (a manufacturer gets more chips out of each wafer) and more powerful. But shrinking the size of solar cells doesn’t help performance because cells rely on maximum surface area to harvest energy.

Instead, the solar industry expects to see prices decline the old-fashion way: larger economies of scale mean suppliers can produce more materials at a lower cost. Improved manufacturing processes also mean that suppliers can create panels with thinner solar cells, which will lower material costs.

Generating electricity from photovoltaics costs between 18 and 23 cents a kilowatt hour. It is projected to go down to 11 to 18 cents by 2010 and then to 5 to 10 cents by 2015, according to the National Renewable Energy Labs. By contrast, electricity in the U.S. costs between 5 and 18 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Klein agreed that higher manufacturing volume and improvement in the solar industry’s supply chain can lower costs. Still, technology to improve cell efficiency or to greatly lower the cost of making solar cells will make a large impact, he said.

Fusion is always a generation or so in the future. It’s a physico-social invariant.

At the risk of straying too far from the subject, I think it is worth commenting on how closeley energy use and economic productivity are related. By having cheap, portable energy, we can travel farther and faster when going to work. We substitute large energy consuming farm equipment for human and animal labor. We no longer need to locate factories on waterways because they are now powered by electricity and the necessary labor and materials are transported by cars and trucks. It is more efficient for us to be able to jump in our cars when we want to go somewhere than to wait for the next mass transit shuttle. In short, energy use equals economic productivity.

Looking at energy scenarios from a productivity perspective, anything that drives up energy costs drives down productivity. This includes subsidies, mandates and taxes. It bothers me to read how many of the decision making factors for each of the scenarios are political rather than economic. It bothers me more when the discussion moves straight from the political motivation to whether technology and economics can catch up enough to make the decisions workable. I do not have a problem with the logic in the article. It clearly states the way things are. I do have a big problem accepting the number of non-economic and anti-market factors that drive the choices.