© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.
That’s the problem with the future
which always creeps up on us. There are huge changes in our society coming but most
people don’t see them because they don’t believe in relatively sudden technological
changes.
Example: many people don’t believe wind
or solar power will have any effect upon them. They see it as the government
throwing money so politicians can get votes and donations. Wind or solar to
them are boondoggles when the government gets involved for political reasons. And
in today’s world I must agree. Today’s world.
That leaves the future of wind and
solar generation which is much different and closer than most people realize.
Currently, except for harvesting government subsidies these technologies are only
of use in houses in the sticks where bringing a power line in would cost the
same as building a battleship.
However, the use of wind and solar will
change. As 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Bob Dylan wrote in 1964: For the times they are a-changin’ You must
believe to see the changes coming. That may catch people and governments
unaware and could mean they are today investing in the wrong technologies.
Solar and wind generation has three major
shortfalls compared to traditional generation: first, the density of the power
while generating it. Secondly, the continuous dependability of the power. Finally,
the transmission and generation cost. All three are deal breakers for adopting
wind or solar in today’s world.
There is another problem adopting
the current commercial wind and solar generation. It is the thousands of dead
birds smacked by wind generation blades or fried from flying into solar death
rays. Our current efforts are not the way to have these technologies become
mainstream.
The change that will enable solar
and wind generation to become mainstream is when innovation dramatically lowers
the cost to store that wind and solar power cheaply at the end-user’s home. This
would allow wind and solar generation to become the technology of choice without
any government subsidies.
Can this happen? Yes, here’s a way
to look at that possibility of massive change.
Twenty years ago, the technology in
my life involved seven different media devices. I used a Canon F1 camera, a
Sony tape recorder/player; a Motorola cell phone, a Gateway home computer with
modem, a digital storage unit to back up my computer files and a VHS video
player plugged into my Sony television.
Seven devices that are now contained
in my Samsung smartphone. And, I now have Wi-Fi which allows me as a writer to
do things I could only dream of doing twenty years ago. Twenty years ago I had
no idea so much change was on the horizon.
That is the same scenario for the
dramatic shift to home-based electrical generation and storage. It starts with
the move to power vehicles with stored electricity rather than fossil fuel.
Currently, the cost per mile of an electric vehicle is above that of gas or
diesel powered vehicles. But like the change in my media devices, the core
issue is the cost of storage which is dropping dramatically.
Take computer memory sticks. Just a
few years ago it was ten dollars for one megabyte of storage in a memory stick.
Now it is ten dollars for a hundred gigabytes. All in a couple years. The same
will happen in power storage which will allow homeowners to have their own wind
or solar storage.
I could write more but that is
enough to point out that having the expectation of oil and gas being a major
benefit to budgets in years to come might just be proven wrong by the dropping
storage costs in whole home batteries.
Stanford University’s Tony Seba has
written about this in, “Clean Disruption
of Energy and Transportation: The industrial age of energy and transportation
will be over by 2030.” It is a very thought provoking dialog about how
technology will change our world soon.
It isn’t if conventional power will
end being useful, only when. That point is when home power storage costs less
than the transmission of traditional energy. Then it will make sense to change.
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