\r\nExperts predicted in 2000 that wind generated power worldwide would\r\n\r\n \r\nAnd you ain’t seen nothing yet:\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\nDubai’s state utility accepted a bid for a solar power plant with a\r\ncost per kilowatt-hour of less than six cents. “Wow,” he\r\nsays, his eyes wide. “That just set everybody on their\r\near.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n \r\nSuch changes, he says, represent a sharp break with the past, not a\r\nslow evolution.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n \r\nGore now understands that solar power is growing like cell phones did.\r\n \r\nAnd it’s not the first subject about which he used to be way too conservative.\r\nHe (or his then-wife Tipper)\r\nwas the reason I was a party to a Supreme Court case against the\r\nCommunications Decency Act.\r\n \r\nBut Gore is finally saying what I and others such as former FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff and former TVA Chair S. David Friedman have been saying for years:\r\n \r\n“We’re going to win this.\r\n<\/p>\r\n \r\n“The only question is how long it takes.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\nLike\r\n\r\nformer FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff predicted in 2013<\/a>,\r\n \r\n“Solar is growing so fast it is going to overtake\r\neverything.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n \r\nWellinghoff gave an example of exponential growth and continued:\r\n \r\n“If a single drop of water on the pitcher’s mound at Dodger\r\nStadium is doubled every minute, a\r\nperson chained to the highest seat would be in danger of drowning in\r\nan hour.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n \r\n“That’s what is happening in solar.\r\nIt could double every two years.”<\/blockquote>\r\n \r\nIt\r\n\r\nmore than doubled in two years<\/a>:\r\nWellinghoff was also too conservative.\r\n \r\nMeanwhile,\r\nthe rosiest prediction for shale gas are for 56% increase over 28 years.\r\nThat’s right, solar power increases more in a single year<\/em>\r\nthan than predicted for fracked methane over several decades.\r\n \r\nThe answer to Al Gore’s question of how long will it take\r\ndepends on whether we’re following the sunny yellow 60.9%\/year\r\ncurve in this graph,\r\nor something closer to the sky-blue 100%\/year curve:\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\nEither way, we see for last year exactly what we expected to see:\r\nwind beat every other power source for total new deployed power in that year.\r\nAnd that will continue for a few years, until solar power passes wind in\r\nnew megawatts deployed per year.\r\nThen in about seven years or sooner solar will pass wind in total cumulative\r\nmegawatts deployed.\r\nThat’s after both wind and solar beat coal for total deployed megawatts.\r\nThen about a year or two later solar will pass natural gas for total deployed megawatts,\r\nemerging as the biggest U.S. power source, within a decade from 2013 when\r\nWellinghoff and I made those predictions.\r\nBy 2023 at 60.9% annual increase in solar deployment.\r\nThat’s eight years from now.\r\n \r\nHow much faster?\r\nWell, the actual solar deployment rate the past couple of years\r\nis at least 65% per year, not 60.9%.\r\nAnd the latest numbers (stay tuned) seem to be even faster than that.\r\nIf we could really push the annual solar deployment rate up to 100%,\r\nsolar would beat everything by 2020.\r\nThat’s only five years from now.\r\n \r\nAnd those projections assume that coal and natural gas deployments continue\r\nto increase at 2012 rates.\r\nMeanwhile, according to Owen Davis, International Business Times, 10 March 2015,\r\n\r\nNearly Every Major Bank Has Ditched Mountaintop Coal Mining<\/a>.\r\nEchoing\r\nwhat I wrote in April 2012<\/a>,\r\nKathleen Rogers and Danny Kennedy wrote\r\n\r\nfor EcoWatch 14 December 2012<\/a>,\r\n \r\nCoal is dead. Nuclear is going down. Solar will eat the lunch of\r\nutilities that don’t start generating it.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n \r\nWind may help even more.\r\nThere are some promising new wind turbine designs,\r\nand even without those Georgia Power (or somebody) could deploy\r\nwind off the Georgia coast and push the wind growth rate up.\r\nBut solar will win with or without more help from wind.\r\n \r\nSure, “natural” gas companies keep trying to push their fracked methane\r\ngouges through our fields and under our rivers to pipe their poisons\r\nto LNG export plants.\r\nBut\r\nSpectra and FPL’s\r\nSabal Trail<\/a>\r\ninvasion aimed through Alabama and southwest Georgia to Florida,\r\nand\r\nKinder Morgan’s\r\n\r\nPalmetto Project<\/a> proposed march through southeast Georgia to the sea\r\nat Jacksonville\r\nare fighting last century’s battles.\r\nSolar is going to win.\r\nAll we have to do is to stop the last thrashings of those dead pipeline snakes.\r\n \r\nMany of the big electric utilities are trying to stop this solar revolution.\r\nBut if they don’t get on board the solar train,\r\nthose already on the train like SolarCity will barrel right by them.\r\nJeremy C. Owens, San Jose Mercury News, 15 March 2015,\r\n\r\nSolarCity launches community microgrids with Tesla batteries<\/a>.\r\nBe afraid, FPL, and Duke Energy, and even mighty Southern Company.\r\n \r\nSolar energy supplying most U.S. electricity is not the end of the process.\r\nMeanwhile, the electric car conversion started by hybrids such as the\r\nToyota Prius and continued by the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf, and of course\r\nTesla, will expand even more rapidly.\r\nElectric cars, like solar power, will be turbocharged as new storage\r\nmethods get commercialized.\r\n \r\nAnd the rest of the world also has to convert.\r\nBut as Gore points out,\r\nObama’s climate deal with China<\/a> is indeed historic.\r\nA year ago January the WWF predicted\r\n\r\nChina can go 80% sun, wind, water power by 2050<\/a>,\r\nimproving quality of life by reducing emissions 90%,\r\nand making Chinese citizens more prosperous.\r\nIf the U.S and China can do it, the whole world can do it.\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\nA world so sunny even Al Gore is smiling.\r\n \r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not even Al Gore saw that the continually decreasing price of solar power was causing exponential deployment growth that will win within a decade. But now he does. Since solar is going to win, building destructive and hazardous petroleum pipelines for short-term profit for a few executives and investors would be short-sighted at best. Let’s […]","protected":false},"author":3,"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":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[216,14,19,6124,104,24,36],"tags":[8348,8753,8349,8704,8701,8709,507,8702,12,7,562,8737,8714,8789,6,8716],"class_list":["post-12632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coal","category-economy","category-history","category-natural-gas-2","category-nuclear","category-solar","category-wind","tag-al-gore","tag-coal","tag-dubai","tag-economy","tag-georgia","tag-history","tag-internet","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-natural-gas","tag-nuclear","tag-solar","tag-tennessee","tag-valdosta","tag-wind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-3hK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12632"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12639,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12632\/revisions\/12639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/www.goodplanet.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/IMG_32441-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/a>\r\nreach 30 gigawatts; by 2010, it was 200 gigawatts, and by last year\r\nit reached nearly 370, or more than 12 times higher. Installations\r\nof solar power would add one new gigawatt per year by 2010,\r\npredictions in 2002 stated. It turned out to be 17 times that by\r\n2010 and 48 times that amount last year.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
\r\n
![](\"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/dd78149a9a769a86ded3b53fbd5e6757.jpg\")
<\/a>\r\nS. David Friedman\r\n\r\nwrote a book in 2007<\/a> saying solar will win.\r\nBut Friedman was too conservative: he assumed technological breakthroughs\r\nwould be necessary, when actually little more than economies of scale\r\nand business models ramping up have kept driving prices down and deployment up.\r\nWhile the “nuclear renaissance” fizzled, and goal got scalped like a\r\nmountaintop removal by shale gas, solar prices parachuted below all of those.\r\nAs\r\n\r\nBloomberg has noticed<\/a>, solar pwoer is now cheaper than all other forms of energy.\r\n\r\n
\r\n
![\"FERC](\"\/blog\/images\/6a0120a58214e4970b017ee7f5d888970d-pi.jpg\")
<\/a>\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n
![](\"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/images\/6a0120a58214e4970b01676575c0bc970b-pi.jpg\")
<\/a>\r\nWhen even our beloved Georgia,\r\nfamous as the most corrupt state in the union,\r\ncan move in one year from way behind to\r\n\r\nfastest growing solar market in the country<\/a>,\r\na new world is indeed coming.\r\n