http://www.fastcoexist.com/3045743/a-german-startup-has-crea...
Does the fact that CO2 makes up a very small portion of the atmosphere make this hard?
http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/201...
We're talking hundreds of gigatonnes of CO2 that have to be stored over a century of CCS. At high temperatures and pressures, when the CO2 is in a dense (supercritical) state, as in geological storage formations, this corresponds to hundreds of billions of cubic meters.
It's a thousand Hoover dams each year full of dense phase CO2. It's truly mindboggling.
So yes, it's difficult to do cheaply.
Which, to people not familiar with the scientific method, is shocking.
Most industries, most of the time, show exponential improvement over time on whatever their primary measure of quality is. Moore's law is the most famous simply because its speed has had such dramatic effects, normally improvement is smaller, for example the 7% increase/year in battery capacity for a fixed price that Tesla's future business plans rely on.
See this graph of the cost of memory storage in hard drives: http://www.jcmit.com/disk2015.htm. (Note that an exponential curve is approximately a straight line on a log graph.)
Every so often there will be breakthroughs which show up as sudden jumps. After the breakthrough is assimilated you'll often see a pause because research plans were disrupted by the breakthrough, and then the curves start going again. Sometimes at a different speed. As an example on the above graph, the sudden order of magnitude price drop between 1995 and 2000 is due to the commercialization of Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR).
This pattern of technological advance is well-known, but the jumps are not predictable in advance. However even after such a jump, your best bet for projecting continued improvement over years to decades is the same methodology.
Everyone seems to be projecting their own egos onto this guy. Their minds say, "If I were proved wrong and had to admit it, I'd be mortified." These people aren't scientists. They're being emotional.
Again, props to this guy.
This is a fantastic example of how government subsidies can help. Had there been no subsidies, the demand for solar power would have been smaller, the industry would not have been compelled to compete that much on improving solar power, and this Harvard researcher's prediction (solar not cheap enough in the near future) might have turned true.
He said these subsidies make no sense because solar is far from being competitive, yet they are the very reason solar became competitive.
My belief is that it wouldn't have happened nearly this fast without both subsidies, and a widespread awareness under investors that there are going to be government incentives for a huge renewable market. But figuring out the amount is impossible.
Imagine if the founders of Solar City also thought like this guy. Suffice to say they probably wouldn't be owning one of the largest US solar companies in the US right now.
Solar City did think like that guy. Solar City is heavily dependent on subsidies and the ability to sell power to utilities at retail, not wholesale, rates. Solar City pulled out of Nevada when Nevada took away some of those benefits.[1] Their business model requires subsidies.
The big utility-scale plants are now profitable at wholesale rates. Even in Nevada.[2] That's what matters.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/01/sol... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Mountain_Solar_Facility
By all accounts, it looks like he had written out a reasonable explanation as to why he predicted solar would not become cost effective. At the end of the day, if something doesn't make financial sense, it won't last long without subsidies from the government.
The assumptions behind his predictions changed and therefore so did the conclusion. Seems pretty reasonable.
Like he says, solar power's intermittency is still an issue in non-sunny places, but in areas with lots of sunlight, the landscape of power generation is changing for the better.