Tag Archives: compound interest

TVA needs to listen to former chair S. David Friedman about solar power

Will you bet on the blinkered money-only policies of the current
TVA Chair, or the accurate clean solar future predictions of former
TVA Chair S. David Friedman?

Seven years ago S. David Friedman wrote:


“As a substitute for oil, coal, and nuclear energy, the sun can
replace the three poisons with inexhaustible fuel.”

The former TVA Chairman wrote that in 2007 his boook

Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How,
which also says (page 4):

There are breakthroughs in new technology that promise to make
the cost of solar power as low as that of coal, nuclear, and oil.
Almost simultaneously in South Africa and the Silicon Valley in the
United States, companies are building huge new solar factories to manufacture
a paper-thin solar coating that can generate electricity that could
actually lower our electric bills.
These breakthroughs promise solar power at 75 percent less than today’s price. Continue reading →

Bloomberg illustrates 63% solar growth in 2012

A graph Bloomberg New Energy Finance posted illustrates
the recent 60%+ growth deployed solar capacity, but
BNEF fails to project solar’s compound interest growth forward.


Look at the solar numbers in that graph:

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
1.6 2.0 2.9 4.9 8.0
Change 25% 45% 69% 63%



Then look at that last row I added, which is each year’s
percentage increase over the previous year, as in
8.0 for 2012 divided by 4.9 for 2011 = 1.63 or 63%.
Slightly more for the previous year, and less in years before that.
In other words, the annual compound growth rate for solar is
around the 65% rate reported

by the solar industry.

And slightly higher than the 60.9% FERC rate I used Continue reading →

Solar power will win like the Internet did

Remember BITNET, FidoNet, or UUCP?
Nope, the Internet overtook all of those.
And in 20 years that’s how young people will remember coal and natural gas plants,
although the waste-disposal costs of nukes will be with us for ten thousand years.
Solar power is going to overtake all other power sources within a decade.
Here’s why I think that.

Jerry Grillo quoted me in Georgia Trend July 2013,

Sun Dancing: As Georgia’s solar capacity shoots skyward, a new state utility is proposed,



“Solar power is the fastest-growing industry in the world, and
it’s growing along in the same way the Internet did,” says
John S. Quarterman, a Harvard-educated author and Internet pioneer
who launched the first commercial online newsletter, among other
things, and who lives in rural Lowndes County.

“Think back 20 years to 1993. How many people had heard of the
Internet? And look at how far we’ve come. What I’m seeing with solar
energy is the same kind of exponential growth. It’s clean energy
that works, and it generates jobs.”

Here are 1992 ten-year graphs of Internet
growth from that newsletter, Matrix News,
using Continue reading →