{"id":241,"date":"2012-12-24T10:36:12","date_gmt":"2012-12-24T15:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/12\/what-is-moores-law-for-solar-power.html"},"modified":"2012-12-24T10:36:12","modified_gmt":"2012-12-24T15:36:12","slug":"what-is-moores-law-for-solar-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/12\/what-is-moores-law-for-solar-power.html","title":{"rendered":"What is Moore’s Law for solar power?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nMany people are unfamiliar with Moore’s Law, and\n\nhow it affects solar power.<\/a>\nMoore’s Law doesn’t occur\nin many technologies or industries,\nbut it’s there in solar photovoltaic (PV).\nFor those of us whose whole working lives have been\naffected by Moore’s Law, seeing it turn up in another field\nis like a flashing neon sign pointing to the future.\nA future of distributed solar power sunrise\nover the crumbling industrial relics of coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants.\nA future with much less control by monopoly utilities,\nwhich is why they fight it.\nIf they even see it coming; Bill Gates didn’t, back in the day,\nbut Jeff Bezos of Amazon did.\nThey both surfed that tide,\nand Moore’s Law made both of them among the richest humans on the planet\nwhile changing the world for all of us.\nSteve Jobs even used it to put a computer in your pocket\nmore powerful than big companies could buy a few decades ago.\nWhat does Moore’s Law for solar power mean for electric power?\n<\/p>\n

\nThis chart shows the telltale symptom of Moore’s Law in solar electricity:\n65% compound annual growth rate in solar power plants\ndeployed for the past 5 years:\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\nSource: \nSolar Power Graphs to Make You Smile<\/a>\nby Zachary Shahan for CleanTechnica 10 June 2011.\n<\/p>\n

\nAs SunPower’s Dinwoodie puts it:\n
\n

\nThat 17 GW installed in 2010 is the equivalent of 17 nuclear power\nplants \u2014 manufactured, shipped and installed in one year. It\ncan take decades just to install a nuclear plant. Think about that.\nI heard Bill Gates recently call solar \u201ccute.\u201d Well,\nthat’s 17 GW of \u201ccute\u201d adding up at an astonishing pace.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nBill Gates should recall that Moore’s Law made formerly “cute” PCs with his\n“cute” operating system Windows expand into every company in the world\nand made him the second richest human on the planet.\nGrowth of computer software markets,\n\nlike for the U.S. as shown in the graph on the right,<\/a>\nis a symptom of the original Moore’s Law.\nSoftware runs on hardware, and these hardware market curves\nare driven more directly by Moore’s Law:\n<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\n<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\nSource:\n\nFrom Altair to iPad: 35 years of personal computer market share<\/a>,
\nby Jeremy Reimer for Ars Technica, 14 August 2012.\n<\/p>\n

\nMoore’s Law underlies all three of those hardware curves.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo what is Moore’s Law?\nGordon Moore, co-founder of Intel,\n\nin a 1965 paper,<\/a>\nnoted that the number of components in integrated circuits\nhad doubled each year from 1958 through 1965;\nhe thought that might continue for at least another ten years.\nIn 2005\n\nMoore looked at it again,<\/a> and said the rate in later years was actually\ndoubling about every two years.\nMoore’s Law has continued like that for 40 years, as shown on this graph:\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\nSource:\n\nTransistor Count and Moore’s Law<\/a> by\n\nWgsimon<\/a>\nin Wikimedia Commons 13 May 2011,
\n\nCreative Commons<\/a>\n\nAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported<\/a> license.\n<\/p>\n

\nThat may not look very fast, because it’s a straight line.\nBut look at that Transistor count left axis:\nit goes from 10,000 to 100,000 to a million, and onwards to\na billion, in a logarithmic scale.\nThat’s 10,000 around 1978 to a billion by about 2008,\nan increase of 100,000 times.\nThat’s the difference between big computers for a few big companies back then\nand a computer in your pocket now more powerful than anything NASA\ncould buy in 1978.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhat’s the equivalent for solar PV?\nWell, solar panels don’t get much smaller, because they still\nneed the same amount of surface area to collect the same amount of sunlight.\nBut they do get cheaper.\nSo the equivalent is\n\nthe plummeting cost of solar electricity,<\/a>\nas shown in this graph of how many Watts you can get for $100 of solar cells:\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\nSource: \nSmaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore’s law apply to solar cells?<\/a>
\nby Ramez Naam in Scientific American 16 March 2011.\n<\/p>\n

\nThat graph doesn’t grow at exactly the same rate in Watts per $100\nas the original Moore’s Law did in components per area.\nThat doesn’t matter.\nWhat matters is that it’s a straight line on a log scale:\ncontinued exponential growth over years.\nYou don’t find that in most markets,\nnot in housing, or automobiles, or sports.\nYou do find it in computer components and in solar PV.\n<\/p>\n

\nMore to follow on some implications of Moore’s Law in solar electricity.\nThe brief version: solar will win,\nand not even Georgia Power or Southern Company can stop it,\nalthough they can continue (for a while) to\ndrag Georgia and the southeast behind while the rest of the world\nreaps the benefits in jobs, energy independence, and clean air and water.\n<\/p>\n

\n-jsq\n<\/p>\n

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