Forecasts for the production of photovoltaic panels are showing continued exponential growth over the next decade. The "economies of volume" are at play, according to Silicon Valley venture capitalist-turned solar entrepreneur Bill Nussey. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is expected to lead to the installation of 950 million solar modules.

15 to 20 years ago, the world did not have 5 TW of plant generation capacity. Unstable polysilicon prices lead to major drama in the solar industry, earning solar stocks the moniker "the solar coaster". But in the wake of bankruptcies and lawsuits, China's manufacturing power took the industry by storm, driving the per-watt price of polysilicon down over 96%.

Today, with the IRA as a catalyst, domestic manufacturing and installations are expected to double every few years, and continue doubling. As long as we can build the required storage, intermittent wireless fusion power will soon be able to power the entire globe.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/manual_tranny:

Forecasts for the production of photovoltaic panels are showing continued exponential growth over the next decade. The "economies of volume" are at play, according to Silicon Valley venture capitalist-turned solar entrepreneur Bill Nussey. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is expected to lead to the installation of 950 million solar modules.

15 to 20 years ago, the world did not have 5 TW of plant generation capacity. Unstable polysilicon prices lead to major drama in the solar industry, earning solar stocks the moniker "the solar coaster". But in the wake of bankruptcies and lawsuits, China's manufacturing power took the industry by storm, driving the per-watt price of polysilicon down over 96%.

Today, with the IRA as a catalyst, domestic manufacturing and installations are expected to double every few years, and continue doubling. As long as we can build the required storage, intermittent wireless fusion power will soon be able to power the entire globe.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10a02cq/from_300_gw_to_3000_gw_per_year_a_utopia/j419hzw/

This is a key line:

> it is incomprehensible how IRENA can expect annual global PV installations to plateau at around 440 GW per year of new solar from 2030 to 2050.

The growth of solar has been exponential, but for some reason people always expect it to suddenly become linear.

Fusion reactors will never be cheaper to run than just harvesting fusion via solar panels. Near zero chance of that. Plus most nations don't want something that complex or proprietary where they can't work on it themselves, can't make the parts themselves and could be cut off from the technology entirely by the handful of Nations that control it. Still need special fuel too so you don't get energy independence like with solar. You are buying fusion fuel pellets forever and hopping they stay cheap.

There's just no need to try to compete against solar costs AND energy storage has far more uses than just fusion.

The energy storage costs will go down to 20-40 USD per megawatt hour and that will be that for competing tech.

How will all these developing nations really ever get fusion and how would fusion ever possibly meet the economics of scale of solar or batteries that can be mass produced in factories globally?

Unlimited power isn't about fusion and energy density. You only need so much energy density and only to the point where it's not working against your costs per megawatt. Unlimited power is about keeping costs low and that means mass production and the lowest complexity that can get the job done.

You should rethink your perspective here. The best technology is always the simplest technology that can do the job not the most overpowered and often complex solution.

I believe he was referring to the sun with 'wireless fusion' which I find rather funny.

You make good points on fusion though.

At the very least we should expect linearly growing growth, like 300, 400, 550, 750...

One issue is that we still do not have good energy storage. Either the industry needs to adjust to the sun or the solar will plateau because they will be selling energy when nobody needs it anymore.

One way to reduce the need for storage is to seriously overbuild capacity, like 7 times more than needed. That way you get good resilience to variability and you need much less storage.

In good times you use the excess electricity for carbon capture for example.

Everybody can run their AC's full blast with the windows open.

That would only work with lots of HVDC cables. In fact if we could produce our electricity about 2 times zones to the west and bring it to the place of consumption by HVDC cables, we could match the demand almost perfectly.
And if we can go 7 times over then I would suggest going for hydrogen or better synthetic fuels. That way we could even store enough renewable energy for the winter and the relatively huge losses would be worth it.

> In fact if we could produce our electricity about 2 times zones to the west and bring it to the place of consumption by HVDC cables, we could match the demand almost perfectly.

Imagine massive floating solar farms in the pacific ocean.

If you can trust chatgpt (which you cant really) about 51 acres of solar panels would be enough for the west coast duck curve.

I think this approach, just massively deploying an overbuilt capacity of solar, really is the future. There are a lot of things you can do with excess power. For example, with enough overcapacity, you don't have to worry about seasonal variations. A solar panel even on a cloudy day in winter still produces some power. If you build enough panels to meet your peak demand on a cloudy winter day, then you really don't have to worry about seasonal variations; only day-to-day variations.

That gives you a ton of excess energy to use during the summer months, but we've always found ways of using excess energy when it's available. Some things we could do:

• Carbon capture

• Synthetic fuel production

• Vastly cheaper aluminum smelting (and other metals where the ore is abundant, but the refining takes a lot of energy.)

• Large multi-story indoor vertical farms. (Vertical multi-story farming is often seen in sci fi, but real indoor farms tend to be confined to single-story greenhouses. This is because there's only so much sunlight available in an area. But with cheap/free energy at peak times, the energy problems disappear.

For the daily swings, even beyond moving energy long distances across a few time zones, there's a lot that can be done to move more demand toward the peak times. For example, homes can be built with better insulation and thermal mass. If a building is constructed with this in mind, it is absolutely possible to have a building that only needs heating/cooling equipment running during the times when solar power is available. In the winter, you use heat pumps powered by cheap solar to heat the building to a bit above the preferred temperature. When the Sun goes down, the heater turns off, but the building has enough insulation and thermal mass that it's only cooled to a bit below comfortable temperature by morning. You can do the same trick with fridges, freezers, water heaters, etc. For washers and dryers, they can be built to give you options. If you want something washed right now, even at 11 PM at night, you can do so, but more for electricity. If you're not in a hurry, you load your laundry and have the washer/dryer simply wait until the Sun rises and drops the spot price of electricity.

I think we have far more potential to shift electricity demand through a day than we give ourselves credit for. We're not used to thinking this way, because we're accustomed to a world where the cost of electricity is constant throughout the day. Batteries and other methods like thermal storage, compressed air storage, etc will always have their place. But I think we can probably eliminate 80-90% of our need for storage to meet daily swings just by being a bit more clever about when and how we use energy.

Hell, I could even think of a way of using thermal mass for something like cooking/baking. Many traditional stoves were built with a ton of thermal mass. Things like this. You could have an oven that was a box surrounded by a ton of insulation and thermal mass. It uses solar power during the day to heat up to say, 350F and then just retains that heat all evening. If you need to cook something in the evening, you just pop it into the already-warmed oven. If you need a temperature over 350F, you use a small bit of expensive evening energy to drive the temp up a bit hotter.

Sure, this seems like a gluttonous waste of energy in a contemporary context. But if energy is superabundant and essentially free during the day, then things like this become possible.

This I’ve heard in relation to electric cars in particular. Countries with a strong car culture have tons of batteries that at any given time are either idle or being used for low-energy applications like music, gaming, or cooling (cars are much smaller then even tiny apartments).

Different tech but same pattern. Plugins hit 0.3% of the global light vehicle market in 2013, they hit 3% in 2019. That's an order of magnitude growth in 6 years. In 2022 they hit 30%, another order of magnitude in just 3 years. And yet most articles talk about EVs hitting 50% in 2035!

US grid solar capacity is at 77 GW and FERC reports another 72 GW are being added in the next year to 18 months, with another 130 GW for the following 18 months. That puts solar at 25% of the US grid capacity by the end of 2026

The EU restarted its solar deployments to avoid Russian energy. And China has been solar's poster child for years.

I expect that the people who own all the assets that are soon to be stranded are in a state of denial and since they control the media people are being mislead.

> for some reason

Bad math education. Nobody understands exponential curves. They’re just hard to fathom if you weren’t explicitly taught them (well) in school.

Evidence: the pandemic

> we still do not have good energy storage

We don’t need it to be good, we just need it to scale and develop at the same rate as PV…which by all measures it seems to be doing.

No amount of over capacity makes the sun shine at night or during a winter storm.

Yes, took me a couple reads to get it. It is funny but perhaps a bit too subtle for some

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i personally dont believe its soo much media manipulation but more like you dont learn of this things unless you are closely following the trends and people just dont understanding exponential curves and severly understimating technological growth and development, a lot of people seem to extrapolate current technological development and believe that we are still going to be living mostly the same in 2100 just maybe with some robots and better cellphones when the trend is that technology completly shifts and changes almost every decade at this point

also another huge issue is that for decades the growth of renewables have been glacially slow and since people like to extrapolate from their life experiences they expect that the growth will remain glacially slow, sum to that the fact that most news about the insane growth of renewables barely makes a dip (you will hear 100 news about how everything is going "faster than expected" before one about renewable energy growth because that has become the media favorite buzzwords to attract clicks) and because of that most people still believe that "nothing is being done", again i dont believe is outright media manipulation is just that bad news sell

also first time i hear EVs being refered as "plugins"

That's why you add wind lol.

We do have some. Solar plus hydropower is an awesome match, and you can even use pumped hydro if you want active storage and not merely something to fill the gaps when there's no sun.

Yepp. People underestimate exponential growth. It took only 11 years here in Norway for electric cars to go from 1% and to 80% of new cars sold. (2011-2022) -- that's the equivalent of +49% per year for over a decade.

Peoples reaction to it tends to be like this:

• 0.5%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 0.75%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 1.2%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 1.8%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 2.6%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 3.8%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 5.8%: EVs are only suitable for a tiny set of niche applications!
• 8.7%: EVs are only suitable for a tiny set of niche applications!
• 13%: Most people will never be well-served by an EV!
• 20%: Most people will never be well-served by an EV!
• 30%: An EV can perhaps work as car number 2 for some households
• 45%: An EV can perhaps work as car number 2 for some households
• 80%: WOOAAA What just happened? Nobody could've foreseen this!!!! Where did all these EVs *suddenly* and *completely unexpectedly* come from??????

It appears to most people that all the growth came in the last 2-3 years and very suddenly. That's not true. Anyone who was ACTUALLY paying attention would've seen that we've had in the viscinity of 50% year-over-year growth for well over a decade, and anyone who knows basic math knows that if that trend stays, the thing takes over the world completely faster than most people anticipate.

You should probably never comment on anything, ever again.

Keep living in your fantasy world of how you want energy to work. I'll keep making real world systems.

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I'm sure there's never been a case of no wind at night either. Couldn't possibly happen.

That is why it's "much less storage" and not "no storage".

plugins is shorthand for BEV + PHEV, with the understanding that PHEV is morphing into BEV. It specifically excludes ICE, hydrogen fuel cells and any 'other' tech.

As to media manipulation take a look at this chart by Auke Hoekstra in the article at: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/07/12/has-the-international-energy-agency-finally-improved-at-forecasting-solar-growth/

Anyone that incompetent would have been fired after the second prediction. Since they never did that, the lying is intentional.

3000GW is entire global electricity production and you want to produce as much extra solar capacity every year? I think that would require major new demand, some sort of flexible way to convert electricity to money that is fine running only when sun is out.

Given such a demand is developed though, the sky is the limit really, there is no practical limit of "we have no more space for solar panels". But you do have the practical limit that you can't sell electricity from more panels if all demand is already met.

But if wind already does the job, what do you need solar for?

What is needed is flexible demand to take any and all electricity generated and turn into money. Electricity you can't sell if the least cost efficient of them all, so there is only so far you can go by building overcapacity.

> But if wind already does the job, what do you need solar for?

Because wind and solar tend to be seasonally complementary.

> What is needed is flexible demand to take any and all electricity generated and turn into money.

I like the idea to turn it into jet fuel - the most difficult area to electrify. Maybe also fuel for cargo ships.

All electric ammonia economy is certainly a contender.

It only works in Norway because the state pretty much pays for the Tesla. It's Cheaper than ANY other car.

Solar panels do not produce nameplate capacity because of clouds, rain, snow, and nighttime. So, we have to build significantly more 'capacity' (GW) in order to produce the amount of energy we actually consume over time (GWh). Naturally, this is why energy storage is so important.

Your math is wrong in other ways too, because you are assuming that in the future we will be consuming the same amount of electricity as we are consuming today. That's pretty silly, since today we are only beginning to electrify buildings, manufacturing, and transportation. In order to do that, we will need additions of 3,000 GW of capacity each year.

The state subsidizes EVs with a grand total of ZERO dollars, so I see no justification for claiming that the state pays for it.

EVs are however exempt from the CO2-tax that ICE-cars pay, depending on how much they pollute per kilometer driven, and that is indeed the main reason why Norway is about 5 years ahead of other countries in EV-adoption.

It's nonsense to claim that it only works in Norway because of this though; many other countries have similar market-share trajectories that are merely a few years behind.

That wasn't the point here though, the point was that people who don't understand exponential growth tend to see it as nothing happening for many years, and then SUDDENLY the thing explodes. Even when the reality is, like in the example-numbers I posted here, that there's pretty steady growth throughout.

> EVs are however exempt from the CO2-tax that ICE-cars pay, depending on how much they pollute per kilometer driven, and that is indeed the main reason why Norway is about 5 years ahead of other countries in EV-adoption.

Yes, that's a subsidy that costs a shit ton of money..... Not getting SUBSTANTIAL TAX INCOME is also a subsidy.

> It's nonsense to claim that it only works in Norway because of this though; many other countries have similar market-share trajectories that are merely a few years behind.

It works in every country, but not every country is willing to spend tens of billions on this. At at least 10k per car, that's what it costs....