Well, the cynic would say, “Ha!
Solar energy?
That’s for Hollywood millionaires,” and,
“I’ve heard that so often, that we’re
going to live in solar houses, and it never
happened!
So ha!”
Well, you see, there is a reason that we don’t
live in the solar age, and it doesn’t have
anything to do with solar cells at all.
You see, there’s a missing link that’s,
why we don’t have wind power and solar power
everywhere.
And the missing link is something we forget,
and that is: Storage!
The battery.
A hundred years ago Thomas Edison and Henry
Ford were friends; they would vacation together
and they were rivals, of course, and they
had a bet: what would energize the 20th century?
Well Edison said the battery.
Well, Ford said no, it’s going to be the
internal combustion engine.
Well, people said the solution to that is
obvious: the internal combustion engine is
dangerous because gasoline engines will explode.
Batteries will not explode, but gasoline will,
and having a gas station on every block?
That’s ridiculous.
That’s stupid.
So many people said that it’s obvious Edison
is going to win; we’re not going to have
gas pumps on every block; and we’re not
going to have explosions take place on our
highways.
Well, guess what happened?
The opposite happened.
And that is: Henry Ford was right, at least
for the 20th century.
And now General Motors, General Motors recently
announced that they can see the time when
they will phase out completely the internal
combustion engine.
This is huge.
Think about that.
50 percent of our carbon dioxide production
comes from the transportation sector, and
General Motors is already talking about phasing
out the internal combustion engine.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is the battery: the lowly battery
that everybody forgets.
You see, we all know Moore’s law: computer
power doubles every 18 months, but Moore’s
law only applies to ultra violet etching on
computer silicon wafers.
It doesn’t apply for solar cells.
Storage is the basic problem—there’s no
Moore’s law for the battery.
However, now that inventors are getting wind
of this, we now see new energy, new creativity,
new ideas, and so the price of battery power
is of dropping by about seven percent a year.
This means opportunities for the super-battery.
It’s no accident that Elon Musk of Tesla
Motors has made the battery a priority.
He wants to market these super batteries so
that when the sun doesn’t shine and the
winds don’t blow, you can still have large
quantities of solar power.
He’s also marketing these batteries for
industries, because what happens if you can’t
necessarily make peak summer and peak winter
demands of power?
Why should a facility have to generate this
gigantic infrastructure to generate electricity,
just for peak summer and peak winter?
That’s where the super-battery comes in.
And so with the price of batteries dropping
I think we’re going to see the economics
of solar and wind turn the other way, so they
are competitive with fossil fuels.
