Solar Energy Will Dominate Energy Within 12 Years
During a medical technology symposium, Ray Kurzweil claimed that solar energy generation might become the most popular power type in the next one decade or over. His statement is hard to accept, though, as currently solar energy represents only two percent of global power supplies.
During a medical technology symposium, Ray Kurzweil claimed that solar energy generation might become the most popular power type in the next one decade or over. His statement is hard to accept, though, as currently solar energy represents only two percent of global power supplies. However, Ray’s prediction might be true based on the fact that solar energy has been incredibly popular in the past twenty years.
According to Solar Power World, Ray Kurzweil’s crucial view was that no matter how small, solar has started to increase its market share two times every twenty-four months. Hence, the two percent mentioned above is an increase from only zero-point-five in 2012.
Kurzweil’s basic point, as reported by Solar Power World, was that while solar is still tiny, it has begun to reliably double its market share every two years—today’s 2% share is up from just 0.5% in 2012.
The Get Data Sheet, in Fortunes technology newsletter, shows how several analysts expand growth linearly. And the conclusion is that we will notice a 0.5 percent annual growth in solar market share, and this will cause a twelve percent increase in twenty years. But Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns is entirely left out in the linear analysis. The law is interpreted this way: the more new technology options get tinier and cheaper, their development will become exponential.
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So he suggests studying the growth rate of solar power regarding how the solar market is doubling every twenty-four months rather a year over year percentage. Hence, if the current two percent share doubles every 24 months, solar should have attained one hundred percent market share in twelve years.
Technically, this implies that solar will have attained up to one hundred and twenty-eight percent of market share in twelve years. In the real world, though, Ray Kurzweil’s projections are subject to discussion. Since fossil fuel producers are not collapsing anytime soon, it is highly unlikely that solar will achieve even one hundred percent.
However, fossil fuel major producer dismiss Kurzweil’s point at their risk. This is the same man who predicted cloud computing, wearable tech and mobile internet almost twenty years back using his Law of Accelerating Returns.
Featured Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
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Yusuf Demir
Yusuf Demir is the Cloud & Software Reporter at TrendinTech, where he covers cloud infrastructure, enterprise platforms, developer tools and the digital transformation of businesses in the UK and the United States. He previously reported on enterprise technology for The Register in London and covered the cloud and SaaS beat for TechCrunch, following the competition between AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, the open source licensing disputes and the rise of Kubernetes. Yusuf holds an MEng in Computing from Imperial College London and speaks regularly at KubeCon and AWS re:Invent, where he moderates conversations with engineers and chief technology officers. He is most interested in the gap between vendor roadmaps and the systems engineers actually run, and in what the cloud bill looks like once the free credits expire.
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