Quickening pace of clean energy growth is good news

By J. Doyne Farmer / For the Los Angeles Times

Climate change has been viewed almost universally as a burden, a hot potato to be passed from country to country at annual climate change conferences.

Although it’s widely known that climate-friendly solar and wind energy have become cheaper and easier to produce, most don’t realize that they are very likely to get even less expensive and grow quickly. That will have enormous political and business consequences, creating not just hazards but also tremendous opportunities.

Because technological progress depends on unforeseen innovations, it is to an extent unpredictable: We don’t know what the next innovation will be. Nonetheless, the rate at which a given kind of technology improves is remarkably predictable.

The best-known example is Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore, who would go on to co-found Intel, predicted that microchip density would double every two years, a projection that has proved accurate to this day. As the density of these components has increased, their relative cost and energy consumption has fallen and their speed has accelerated. As a result of this exponential improvement in efficiency, today’s computers are about a billion times more powerful than they were when Moore made his prediction.

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