According to Travis Bradford, chief operating officer of the Carbon War Room and president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, solar prices are falling 5 percent to 6 percent annually, and capacity is growing at a rate of 30 percent per year. So when critics point out that solar currently accounts for 1 percent of our energy, that’s linear thinking in an exponential world. Expanding today’s 1 percent penetration at an annual growth of 30 percent puts us eighteen years away from meeting 100 percent of our energy needs with solar.
And growth doesn’t end there, but it certainly gets interesting. Ten years later— twenty-eight years from now— at this rate we’d be producing 1,550 percent of today’s global energy needs via solar. And, even better, at the same time that production is going up, technology is making every electron go even further. Whether it’s the smart grid making energy use two- or threefold more efficient, or innovations like the LED lightbulb dropping the energy needed to light a room from one hundred watts to five watts, there is dramatic change ahead. With efficiencies lowering our usage and innovation increasing our supply, the combination really could produce a squanderable abundance of energy.
So what do we do with a squanderable abundance of energy? Of course, Metcalfe’s been thinking about this for some time. “First,” he proposes, “why not drop the price of energy by an order of magnitude, driving the planet’s economic growth through the roof? Second, we could truly open the space frontier, using that energy to send millions of people to the Moon or Mars. Third, with that amount of energy, you can supply every person on the Earth with the American standard of fresh, clean water every day. And fourth, how about using that energy to actually remove CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere. I know a professor at the University of Calgary, Dr. David Keith, who has developed such a machine. Back it up with cheap energy, and we might even solve global warming. I’m sure there’s a much longer list of great examples.”
To see how much longer that list might be, I tweeted Metcalfe’s question. My favorite answer came from a Twitter handle BckRogers, who wrote: “All struggles are effectively conflicts over the energy potential of resources. So end war.” I’m not entirely sure it’s that simple, but considering everything we’ve discussed in this chapter, one thing seems certain: we are going to find out.
Kotler, Steven; Diamandis, Peter H. (2012-02-21). Abundance (pp. 172-173). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.