My guiding influences are Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, from whom I took the phrase “barrier busting” (see the explanation here) and “integrative design“, and Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, futurist, and author of the Law of Accelerating Returns. Between them they describe a future of appropriate energy usage, based on sustainable and renewable resources, enabled by continuing technological advances obeying Moore’s Law.

Please drop by and check it out – I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

green energy, sustainability, amory lovins, kurzweil, integrative design

Since I “had” to go to Home Depot anyway, I took the opportunity of asking one of the experts there about which CFL I should use to get the old incandescent light feeling back. As it turned out, the answer was simple, although it would have taken me much testing to figure out on my own: buy CFLs that are called “soft white.” The bulb I was using was a “daylight” bulb – these are the ones to avoid. A “soft white” CFL has a warm light, like an incandescent.

I bought a couple, replaced the “daylight” bulb in my bedside lamp, and am now happily saving a few pennies a day on lighting and air conditioning with my wonderful “soft white” CFL.

Solar energy will cost the same as power produced by coal, natural gas and nuclear plants in about a decade, a report released Tuesday suggests. By then, the price parity could propel solar adoption so that it accounts for 10 percent of U.S. electricity generation by 2025

If you listen to this kind of thinking, solar energy (which is defined as what, by the way?) is still far more expensive than other kinds. But solar energy, even today, has a finite payback time – if I put solar collectors on my roof, for example, eventually they will pay for themselves.

So that’s one way it’s wrong.

Secondly, the study assumes that conventional energy prices will go up by 3% per year. That could be a slight underestimate. Didn’t we just experience a three month period where gas prices nearly doubled? (That’s 100%, folks!).

I can’t make any argument about the assumption that solar energy prices will come down 18% per year. That’s a lot, by one metric, but we’ve certainly seen large and faster price drops in high tech in the past. Even the iPhone, last week, dropped in price by almost 50% in less than a year. Sure, that was partly through some magic AT&T financial pixie dust, but to the user, it’s a clear 50% price cut. There’s no reason similar magic pixie dust, whether from the government or from the utilities themselves, won’t contribute to market price declines.

The claim that solar currently accounts for less than 1/10th of a percent of the U.S. energy supply today is fine. But the assumption that it will still be less than 1 percent in 2015 (seven years from now) is curious. If we start at .1 percent, and double our solar usage every year, we end up at 128 times as much – 12.8% of today’s total. This is the amazing power of Ray Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns.” Even if it takes two years for each doubling, we’re still up a factor of 32x in seven years. That means 3.2% today’s usage. Our total energy usage may also go up (although there are very good reasons to think it may not go up much and and will be starting a downward trajectory), but for a 32x increase in solar supply to translate to 1% of our total energy use, total energy use would have to double. Not too likely in the U.S., where population growth has stopped, and SUVs are starting their long decline.

Finally, there’s good reason to believe that solar energy will actually have a much larger share of U.S. energy usage, due to the power of “negawatts” (as explained brilliantly by Amory Lovins in this series of talks at Stanford in 2007), in which efficiency turns out to be the most cost effective way to power industry and create profits. Oh, and by the way, it significantly reduces our energy usage, by as much as a factor of five to seven!

The article combines a couple of types of fallacious thinking – that technological progress is linear, for example, rather than geometric, and that other factors, such as the desire to reduce greenhouse gases or realizing the benefits of negawatts throughout the economy, don’t have an additional accelerating effect on technology changes.