MQ on solar;
MonteQuest wrote:
They are not considered because they can't do the job. Neither can conservation or efficiency gains.
What's the job? Mitigate peak oil short-term.
Only more oil can mitigate peak oil short-term.
Guess what? I agree with you.
This is why I visit this site, because I’m concerned about the short/medium term, though I think there is a reasonable chance that we will be okay in the long term. Though I think it’s going to be an ‘interesting’ road in the short-term.
Why do I think we will be okay in the long-term? Obviously I’m very pro-technology, but unlike many doomers, I think a serious case can be made for the continuing progress of science and technology, even in a declining energy environment. The historic example of this is the Great Depression and WWII, which both saw smooth sailing for science and technology. Even war torn, energy starved Germany saw progress smoothly advancing, right up to the end of the war. Any theory on energy decline eventually causing a halt to progress is pure speculation, and even if accurate, how long will it take to stop the immense inertia of scientific progress? Less than 25 years?
Another reason progress will continue;
MonteQuest wrote:If suddenly, everyone decides to go solar, won't it be like buying ice or generators during a hurricane?
So now we’ve got all these PO problems unfolding, not to mention the increasingly difficult to ignore signs of climate change, and the demand for solar is skyrocketing. Like buying ice or generators during a hurricane, most people are going without, but that’s besides the point. During the surge in demand, solar continues to grow, continuing to follow these very early stages of its exponential curve.
The thing about solar is though, is that it’s unlike any other energy technology in that it has a remarkably short learning rate (it’s more in line with the learning rate of things like electronics and computers). While Nuclear or coal or even smaller renewables all take many years, often decades, for design changes to be implemented, solar, partly because it is always implemented in much smaller numbers, can bring about design changes in a number of weeks (and the rate of this change is of course accelerating).
Now an ecologist especially should be able to see why this is so important; it’s exactly like in biology, if you have an established and successful species that is not undergoing rapid change through a process of natural selection (which in this analogy are the coal, nuclear, NG, and all the other established power generation technologies), and then you’ve got this one little, seemingly insignificant species that is undergoing exceptionally rapid change through natural selection (analogous with solar). The species in this hypothetical natural environment (or it’s descendents anyway) rapidly (rapid in the natural history sense) rises to become the dominant species in the environment. Just as with such a rapid learning curve as solar, it will rapidly “evolve” to become the dominant energy technology, thanks to its rapid learning rate.
And given that we can expect demand for solar to be beyond supply for the foreseeable future, it’s unlikely that it will stop evolving. Even in economic collapse, and in an energy starved environment (in fact perhaps
because of these), there will be much incentive to invest in solar and develop the latest improvement to the design.
And so eventually, probably after several decades of post PO hardship, we will likely end up with advanced solar technology that can easily and cheaply be rolled out and finally meet the worlds energy needs. Though by this stage, solar would be very unlike its distant ancestors that we know today. Given enough technological evolution, solar technology will be cheaply and easily producible, scalable, and with enough of it, a suitable energy source to produce a liquid fuel for replacing petroleum/gasoline.
Of course this is just my logic, which I’m sure you can all pick holes in, and at the very least can argue that since I can’t point to any studies that include accelerating growth and theories of technological evolution into their projections that I must clearly be wrong. Though this would not be the first time that industry experts have failed to appreciate the rate of accelerating progress when making projections of a technologies future uptake.
"Mother Nature is a psychopathic bitch, and she is out to get you. You have to adapt, change or die." - Tihamer Toth-Fejel, nanotech researcher/engineer.