Do you expect the growth rate of Google over the next 20 years will be the same as it was between 1999 and today?

As things mature you don't get the same level of exponential growth. Meanwhile the subsidies for solar are being reduced etc.

And your chart is installed capacity, not panel production capacity. The growth in panel production capacity is lower than that visual implies.

But let's suppose we could replace nuclear with solar. That doesn't really work because solar can't produce at night and adding the requirement of batteries would make the demand for daytime-only solar generation fall off significantly, but suppose we could do it. That's still not what we need -- we need the expanding solar capacity to replace coal. Every GW of nuclear it would have to replace is one more GW of coal that stays online.

And furthermore, heating is needed when days are the shortest.

We aren't going to heat our homes with solar power.

I would guess that we'll see far more thermal storage (refrigerators, water heaters, etc...) in households as appliances get smarter.

That's why I went with air-based heat pumps instead of geothermal. Everyone I spoke with told me that it was very risky, cost-wise, to install where I live.

Granted, geothermal might be more affordable in other geologies.

photovoltaic no, molten salt yes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_...

btw, driving by them at daytime is pretty weird... the collectors look literally like close-up stars floating above the surface

But people are interested in photovoltaics because they're cost-competitive (during the day at least).

Seems like those would take up lots of land area and easily fry and possibly blind animals, especially birds that get too close.

They do look cool though.

Have all the factories that got us to this level of (obviously) installed capacity burned down recently? Have the investors who invested in them and the engineers who built them all died?

OK, I'll make a prediction. Solar capacity will rise to 100% of today's total capacity, and it still won't displace lots of other energy sources. Why? Because when power is cheaper and has fewer negative externalities, we'll use more of it.

If you want to be a stickler, what that actually means is that it has never happened before. Have we ever installed ~2500 GW of new photovoltaic generation capacity over a twenty year period? Of any individual generation method?

> Have all the factories that got us to this level of (obviously) installed capacity burned down recently? Have the investors who invested in them and the engineers who built them all died?

It's not just a question of supply. It's also a question of demand.

Subsidizing five times as much capacity would require five time as much government money, which may not be available. If the subsidies end, the demand curve takes a hit.

In addition to that, the fact that solar only generates during the day hasn't yet become an issue because the daytime demand is higher, so solar can currently be efficiently used to satisfy the demand differential between day and night. But once there is enough solar generating capacity to satisfy the full differential, that efficiency ends and you start having to deal with expensive energy storage or paying capital and maintenance for alternative generation which is idle and unproductive half the day, effectively requiring the cost of solar to fall lower than the alternative's fuel/operating cost only and not the total cost including capital and maintenance, because the capital and maintenance then have to be paid anyway to make the capacity available at night.

It has also been getting installed more in the locations amenable to it -- places with more sunlight, clearer skies and less expensive land. Notice that a lot of the existing capacity is in places like Arizona and not places like Seattle. But once the demand in those locations is satisfied, you have to move to places without those characteristics and you get less power at higher cost.

Meanwhile just because you have the existing supply doesn't mean you have the existing supply. You need the price to fall to the level that it becomes economical to generate power even for use at night in Seattle, but that price may be lower than the price that customers in Asia and South America would pay, so even if the supply exists, it ends up going somewhere else first.

All this to say that extrapolating from an exponential curve is generally wrong sooner or later, and frequently sooner.

> Solar capacity will rise to 100% of today's total capacity, and it still won't displace lots of other energy sources. Why? Because when power is cheaper and has fewer negative externalities, we'll use more of it.

If it becomes genuinely cheaper even in northern cities and even with the cost of energy storage, it will displace lots of other energy sources and we'll use more of it. But that's still speculation that may or may not ever actually happen. And maybe it does, but it's still justifiable to be prepared if it doesn't.

According to "The Shift Project" [0], we added over 1700 GW of fossil fuel generation between 1994 and 2014. Since less than 900 GW was added between 1980 and 2000, that was also "unprecedented", if we're using this weak definition of that word. We can expect any twenty-year period for any generation mode other than maybe dried-dung burning to be unprecedented in that sense. 1700 is still in the same ballpark for a smaller population with less economic development than we can expect twenty years from now.

It's also a question of demand.

OK, sure, maybe we won't need that much power. Maybe we'll need more. Maybe we'll need it earlier or later. Let's try to remember the discussion we're having, though. TFA is crying about the fate of nuclear. One of their cries is that nuclear is the only generation mode that can control greenhouse gases. In order to ignore the elephants called "solar" and "wind", they have to pretend that the growth in those generation modes will soon slow down massively. You don't save that ridiculous pretense by wondering about demand. The demand level is part of the premise of their whole ridiculous argument. If demand ends up being less, then we won't need as much solar and wind power.

[0] https://www.tsp-data-portal.org/TOP-20-Capacity#tspQvChart

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/renewables-investment-overtak...

And it's not just the cost of solar/wind that's dropping... it's the cost of short-term energy storage, by way of batteries/thermal/hydro/etc. Nuclear plants are base-load power, good for long-term stable output rather than quick spikes up and down. But short-term storage allows solar/wind to act as baseline as well, capturing more when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and dumping it from storage when needed.

Committing to expensive nuclear power plants now, with this much disruption going on, is a good way for a utility to go bankrupt twenty, thirty years from now.

The use of the term "hurting" here is a tell. Yeah, you know, maybe fixing the planet will require a mobilization on the scale of going to war and result in higher prices. That's not hurting people; that's helping our children live on a planet free of nuclear waste and climate disaster.

[1] "Such a drastic increase in renewable power generation would create serious challenges in integrating the new sources into the broader energy system. Clean energy transitions in advanced economies would also require $1.6 trillion in additional investment over the same period, which would end up hurting consumers through higher electricity bills."

Nothing misleading and indeed an unprecedented production increase.

It's not the ratio that is hard, it's the raw amount.

Parent comments point is that the 5x growth is not unprecedentedly fast compared to the past 20 years, its unprecedentedly slow compared to the past 20 years. Contrary to what the quote claims, and in line with projections from the past, the solar business would have to seriously slow down to miss the 5x milestone.

The article is clear and accurate. Deploying close to 3000 GW is an unprecedented effort.

The current linear growth trajectory is 2,000 GW over 20 years, and that is likely to be a hilarious underestimate.

Or do I misunderstand what you're saying?

tl;dr The International Energy Agency kept predicting, year after year, in the face of all the evidence, that solar production would plateau.

On a big picture view:

Tony Seba: Clean Disruption - Energy & Transportation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0

On a more micro level view:

Solar power solutions coming to places with no grid:

https://medium.com/zolaelectric/infinity-smart-grid-deliveri...

It's hard in the beginning, because of research and development. After that, you got the technology side covered, you got the processes side covered, all you need is to build and install.

Making the first mobile phones was hard. Making another million mobile phones today: not that hard. Especially if you make a million more of an established model.