Arnold Kling has some thoughts on our near-term (in the next couple decades) energy future.
2 thoughts on “The Solar Singularity?”
Comments are closed.
Arnold Kling has some thoughts on our near-term (in the next couple decades) energy future.
Comments are closed.
I don’t buy what Kurzwell is selling. Rand is right, without subsidies solar is not a good deal. The problem is the cost of purification of the silicon. Until we can get the cost of that down to about 1/4 what it is today we really aren’t going to make a lot of progress.
There are solar technologies that don’t use silicon (CIGS, CdTe, GaAs concentrator, solar thermal) or use much less of it (highly textured Si, x-Si concentrator, a-Si). Each of these has their own issues, though.
The historic decline in the cost of PV has followed an experience curve with an exponent of roughly -0.2 (so, the cost per unit of PV capacity goes as about (cumulative production)^-0.2). This is about what you see in the aerospace industry, not the microelectronics industry.