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One Third of World's Energy Could Be Solar by 2060, Predicts Historically Conservative IEA

By Stephen Lacey, Climate Progress
December 2, 2011   |   4 Comments

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4 Reader Comments
Comment
1 of 4
December 2, 2011
This article is very interesting and realistic. I think that current trends could come to have this scenario. But I would like to investigate and invest more in the study of materials with photovoltaic properties, not as pollutants such as polycrystalline silicon, monocrystalline and thin film, like iron silicon sulfite and its varieties; seems most promising in terms of environmental impact it causes.
Congratulations on the article.
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Comment
2 of 4
Anonymous
December 5, 2011
Silly, at best. Let's assume that world energy demand grows from roughly 500 quads to around 750 quads by then. This suggests that 200 to 250 quads will come from solar. Today, less than 0.2 quads come from solar. (50 GW for 1400 hours would provide about 0.25 quads.) Before we start up the band let solar get to 1 quad. Scaling from 1 to 20 quads will take 20 years if we're lucky. Getting from there to 200 will take a bit longer than 30 more years. These sort of "Miracle Occurs Here" prophecies are not very helpful, in fact, I think they harm the industry's credibility. Getting to 20 quads will be quite an accomplishment -- an improvement of 100x from where we are now. I look forward to the day when we can all proclaim: "All for Sun and Sun for All," but that day is not yet foreseeable.
Comment
3 of 4
December 6, 2011
@ Anonymous #4

Apparently you don't know or you do not realize what is an Exponential Growth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth

Solar growth was bigger than 20-30% for the past several years. If the average growth stays the same:

and the current 40 GWp are multiplied 10 tymes by 1.2 we will have around 250 GWp in 10 years and after 10 more years we will have around 1 500 GWp, in 10 more years - 9 500 GWp.

But keep in mind that the solar industry has very few bottlenecks because it is very distributed and we have good diversity of technologies so the growth can be even bigger.
Comment
4 of 4
December 7, 2011
I have had suspicions about how the Ute's and their lobbiests, no small alliance, are maneuvering to dominate the energy market they affect. I sense that a great solar push will only formulate as solar energy becomes too expensive and complicated in paper permiting and tarriff compliances to be a truly distributed form of energy for the common people, and that is becomming only manageable for the bigger energy users and ute's. The days of cheaper solar energy may soon become the nostalgic past due to good old US market control by those with the loot. Major solar adoption may well remain in the "purchased energy" arena.
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