{"id":1764,"date":"2011-03-09T12:01:33","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T12:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visaisahero.wordpress.com\/?p=1764"},"modified":"2025-03-08T09:06:53","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T09:06:53","slug":"solar-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2011\/03\/09\/solar-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Ray Kurzweil on the future of solar power"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Ray Kurzweil\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ray_Kurzweil\">Ray Kurzweil<\/a>: &#8220;One of my primary theses is that information technologies <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Exponential growth\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Exponential_growth\">grow exponentially<\/a> in capability and power and bandwidth and so on. If you buy an iPhone today, it\u2019s twice as good as two years ago for half that cost. That is happening with <a class=\"zem_slink\" title=\"Solar energy\" rel=\"wikipedia\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Solar_energy\">solar energy<\/a> \u2014 it is doubling every two years. And it didn\u2019t start two years ago, it started 20 years ago. Every two years we have twice as much solar energy in the world.<\/p>\n<p>Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly \u2014 we are only a few years away from parity. And then it\u2019s going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, <strong>even if they don\u2019t care at all about the environment<\/strong>, because of the economics.<\/p>\n<p>So right now it\u2019s at half a percent of the world\u2019s energy. <strong>People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution.<\/strong> But doubling every two years means it\u2019s only eight more doublings before it meets a hundred percent of the world\u2019s energy needs. So that\u2019s 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we\u2019ll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been under way for 20 years.<\/p>\n<p>People say we\u2019re running out of energy. <strong>That\u2019s only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies.<\/strong> We are awash in energy from the sunlight.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cache.boston.com\/universal\/site_graphics\/blogs\/bigpicture\/sol_10_13\/sol09.gif?resize=307%2C273\" alt=\"\" width=\"307\" height=\"273\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a id=\"id-4\" href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/bigpicture\/2008\/10\/the_sun.html\">The Sun &#8211; The Big Picture &#8211;\u00a0<strong>Boston<\/strong>.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ray Kurzweil: &#8220;One of my primary theses is that information technologies grow exponentially in capability and power and bandwidth and so on. If you buy an iPhone today, it\u2019s twice as good as two years ago for half that cost. That is happening with solar energy \u2014 it is doubling&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[582],"tags":[176],"class_list":["post-1764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reference","tag-future"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-ss","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1764"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14659,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764\/revisions\/14659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}