$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Quinny', 'C')A, if QE doesn't boost GDP figures - Why does BOJ and fed bother?

[Graeme]

The Future Growth of Solar Energy Will Shock You

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he energy industry hasn't been disrupted in a meaningful way since oil replaced coal as the main transportation fuel over a century ago. Today, solar energy is on the cusp of upending everything we know about energy, making it possible for households to produce energy, making unproductive desert land into highly productive generating assets, and upending the utility electricity model that's been in place since the days of Thomas Edison.

Just how big can the solar industry be? The opportunity can literally be measured in trillions of dollars.

The next great investing opportunity

Today, the solar industry is a $120 billion industry, which sounds big but that's a figure that needs a lot of context. The world spends $2 trillion every year on electricity and $2.7 trillion on oil at $80 per barrel. Energy is a huge potential market if solar can disrupt it.

What's incredible is that industry analysts are expecting the solar industry to grow 10x over the next 20 years as solar energy competes with conventional electricity on price. That's probably conservative given the exponential growth we could see if demand for solar energy picks up.

I recently talked to SunPower's (NASDAQ: SPWR ) CEO Tom Werner and he put the industry's potential into some context.

This is just a piece of a larger interview, which can be seen here.

Growth could be faster than anyone thinks

While growing 10x sounds impressive, I think that's short changing the solar industry's potential. Remember, enough solar energy hits the earth every hour to power every electrical device, every car, everything that takes energy for an entire year. If companies can cost effectively harness that energy the potential is there for exponential growth.

Consider that the U.S. alone can generate over 1,000 million kilowatts of electricity at summer peak capacity. That would be 1,000 GW of solar capacity in the U.S. alone and that's just peak at power. Solar energy is only 20% to 30% efficient because the sun is only up on average for half of the day, so much more capacity would be needed to power the whole country.

Since the solar industry in the U.S. is only 6.5 GW this year to reach 1,000 GW of installed capacity the industry would have to grow 20% per year for 19 years. That's much faster than the 12% it would take to grow 10x in 20 years. And that's just the U.S.

The point is that growth in solar industry growth could easily exceed 20% for the next decade and the companies who can gain market share could become some of the largest energy companies in the world. If you're not participating in the solar energy revolution, now may be the time to start looking into it.

[Graeme]

US Sees Second-Largest Solar Installation Growth In Q3

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he United States installed 1,354 MW of solar PV in the third quarter of 2014, up 41% over the same period a year earlier, and the making it the second-largest quarter of all time for the US solar industry, bringing the country’s cumulative solar PV capacity up to 16.1 GW.

These numbers come courtesy of GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association in the latest US Solar Market Insight Report, released today. The report also found that, through the first three quarters of 2014, solar PV represented 36% of new capacity to come online, an increase of 29% in 2013 and 9.6% in 2012.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('copious.abundance', ' ')Translation: I have no rebuttal to C.A's data and give up.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Quinny', ' ')CA, if QE doesn't boost GDP figures - Why does BOJ and fed bother?

[Graeme]

How Solar Power Could Slay the Fossil Fuel Empire by 2030

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n just 15 years, the world as we know it will have transformed forever. The ​age of oil, gas, coal and nuclear will be over. A new age of clean power and smarter cars will fundamentally, totally, and permanently disrupt the existing fossil fuel-dependent industrial infrastructure in a way that even the most starry-eyed proponents of ‘green energy’ could never have imagined.

These are not the airy-fairy hopes of a tree-hugging hippy living off the land in an eco-commune. It’s the startling verdict of ​Tony Seba, a lecturer in business entrepreneurship, disruption and clean energy at Stanford University and a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Seba began his career at Cisco Systems in 1993, where he predicted the internet-fueled mobile revolution at a time when most telecoms experts were warning of the impossibility of building an Internet the size of the US, let alone the world. Now he is predicting the “inevitable” disruption of the fossil fuel infrastructure.

Seba’s thesis, set out in more detail in his new book Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation, is that by 2030 “the industrial age of energy and transportation will be over,” swept away by “exponentially improving technologies such as solar, electric vehicles, and self-driving cars.”


Two days after his JP Morgan lecture, Seba was addressing the 2014 Global Leaders’ Forum in south Korea, sponsored by Korean government ministries for science and technology, where he elaborated on the prospects of an energy revolution. Within just 15 years, he said, solar and wind power will provide 100 percent of energy in competitive markets, with no need for government subsidies.

Over the last year Seba has even been invited to share his vision with oil and gas executives in the US and Europe. “Essentially, I’m telling them you’re out of business in less than 15 years,” Seba said.
Revolutionary economics of renewables

For Seba, there is a simple reason that the economics of solar and wind are superior to the extractive industries. Extraction economics is about decreasing returns. As reserves deplete and production shifts to more expensive unconventional sources, costs of extraction rise. Oil prices may have dropped dramatically due to the OPEC supply glut, but costs of production remain high. Since 2000, the oil industry's investments have risen threefold by 180 percent, translating into a global oil supply increase of just 14 percent.

In contrast, the clean disruption is about increasing returns and decreasing costs. Seba, who dismisses biomass, biofuels and hydro-electric as uneconomical, points out that with every doubling of solar infrastructure, the production costs of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels fall by 22 percent. “The higher the demand for solar PV, the lower the cost of solar for everyone, everywhere,” said Seba. “All this enables more growth in the solar marketplace, which, because of the solar learning curve, further pushes down costs.”

[Graeme]

The energy transition: redefining investment portfolios

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')nvestments in utilities have, for good reason, earned a reputation for steady, reliable, returns. And as the global energy transition sees renewable energy evolve from being a subsidised optionality, it would appear that it isn’t just the world’s power generation portfolio that is being redefined. Recognising that the adoption of utility-scale solar is being driven by market realities, there is growing evidence that investors too are reshuffling their portfolios.

Given that investing is hardly, if ever, driven by altruistic motives, this transition is a clear indication of the fact that renewables in general and solar in particular can now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with conventional power generation sources, technically and economically. And, as market realities drive global growth in solar energy, the fact is that utility-scale solar makes a good investment for a range of reasons; the most obvious one being resource reliability.

Solar advocates like to point to the fact that every hour the sun beams more energy onto our planet than we need to satisfy our total power needs for an entire year. Beyond the rhetoric, however, solar irradiation has never been better understood than it is today, making it a more reliable fuel source than it’s ever been. In fact, irradiation has been mapped in great detail in most parts of the world and sophisticated measurement technologies – such as pyranometers – supplement global data with the site-specific information required to accurately forecast energy output and facilitate engineering.

PV technology itself has evolved to such an extent that accurate energy forecasts can now be created for a planned solar project, factoring in solar irradiation, weather modelling and technological variables, such as improvements in conversion efficiency. The latter is crucial when you consider that companies continue to make leaps forward in efficiency and will continue to do so in increments that would have a positive impact on the profitability of a future project.


The final element that attracts investors is the fact that utility companies around the world are increasingly embracing solar. Legacy concerns about adding variable generation to the grid and its potential impact on stability have proven to have been unfounded. On the contrary, utility-scale solar has been shown to stabilise the grid, while enabling the optimisation of existing conventional generation assets, delivering cost-competitive electricity and, as a bonus, allowing utility companies to comply with ever more stringent emissions regulations.

Add lucrative but sustainably designed feed-in tariffs (FiTs) or long-term power purchase agreements (PPA) to the equation and it’s easy to see why experienced investors, with an eye on the future, have ramped up their solar investments and, by all indications, will continue to do so.

[MonteQuest]

Funny. The news lately seems to be backing me up on this decoupling nonsense. I got lots more to come.

No Growth Without Debt

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')here can be no growth without debt ratcheting ever higher.

That, at least, seems to be the message filtering through from policymakers.

Take the latest projections from the U.K.’s Office for Budget Responsibility, an official but independent economics agency. The OBR sees British household gross debt to income ratios rising back to their pre-crisis highs of a shade under 170% of income by the first quarter of 2018. And climbing ever more vertiginously from there.

Part of this rise is an offset to falling government debt levels.

And what does the U.K. gain from that borrowing boom? Roughly 2.3% annual GDP growth.

[Graeme]

How the U.S. Can Sustainably Become the World's Top Economy Again

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')hina has overtaken the U.S. as the world's top economy. But in taking a few examples from China, as well as investing in jobs that stay in America and taking steps to insure economic stability for the majority of American workers, the U.S. can come out on top again. And we can do it without having to decimate working people or the environment.


Photovoltaic energy by way of solar panels and wind energy manufacturing is on track to create exponentially more jobs than in the oil and gas sector over the next decade. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, the U.S. employs 625,000 people in the renewable energy sector. China employs 2.6 million. As oil production continues to slow down, those numbers will only grow larger. Over the next several decades, states investing in wind and solar power will experience dramatic job growth in the manufacturing, installation, transportation, and maintenance of wind turbines and solar panels. Prominent investors like Warren Buffett are betting big on the industry's long-term growth, as Berkshire Hathaway has already invested nearly $17 billion in wind, solar, and geothermal energy and aims to double that investment over the next decade.


It may take a decade or two, but if the U.S. implemented these solutions tomorrow, we would be on track to re-take the top spot in the world's fastest-growing economies. And we could do it while preserving the Earth for future generations and treating working people with the dignity they deserve.

[MonteQuest]

In 1972, I read a study published by the Club of Rome, entitled, The Limits to Growth. Based on a technique known as systems dynamics, developed by Professor Jay Forrester at MIT, a large-scale computer model was constructed to simulate likely future outcomes of the world economy and to simulate the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies.

One of the three conclusions of the study showed that piecemeal approaches to solving the individual problems will not be successful. To demonstrate this point, the authors arbitrarily double their estimates of the resource base and allow the model to trace out an alternative vision based on this new higher level of resources. In this alternative vision the collapse still occurs, but this time it is caused by excessive pollution generated by the increased pace of industrialization permitted by the greater availability of resources. The authors then suggest that if the depletable resource and pollution problems were somehow jointly solved, population would grow unabated and the availability of food would become the binding constraint. In this model the removal of one limit merely causes the system to bump subsequently into another one, usually with more dire consequences.

So, if renewable energy replaces fossil fuels and solves the GHG issue, then overshoot will be perpetuated to an even worse end.

[Graeme]

Again your conclusions are flawed - see the first post in this thread. I'll come back to this later; busy now.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', 'A')gain your conclusions are flawed

[Graeme]

My first comment is that the Club of Rome report shows that if we continue with BAU, then we are facing catastrophe. We need to change course, and that was what was proposed in the other thread I referred to. In fact, we are starting on the alternative path toward clean energy growth gradually right now. We have have been following the course outlined by the original study as pointed out by an Australian group recently.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')ur research does not indicate that collapse of the world economy, environment and population is a certainty. Nor do we claim the future will unfold exactly as the MIT researchers predicted back in 1972. Wars could break out; so could genuine global environmental leadership. Either could dramatically affect the trajectory.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', 'M')y first comment is that the Club of Rome report shows that if we continue with BAU, then we are facing catastrophe. We need to change course, and that was what was proposed in the other thread I referred to.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', ' ')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')ur research does not indicate that collapse of the world economy, environment and population is a certainty. Nor do we claim the future will unfold exactly as the MIT researchers predicted back in 1972.

[Graeme]

Yes, 42 years years of BAU is being overcome. You haven't been following recent trends. We are changing course from BAU and moving on an exponential path toward clean energy. That will become apparent over the next decade or two.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', ' ')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ut there is no reason to continue to run our societies and our economies as we have. Nor is there any reason to deprive ourselves and our progeny of the material comforts that the industrial revolution has provided us in the name of “saving the planet.”

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', 'Y')es, 42 years years of BAU is being overcome. You haven't been following recent trends. We are changing course from BAU and moving on an exponential path toward clean energy. That will become apparent over the next decade or two.

[Graeme]

Yes that's right but you didn't read what I posted. We can still have our cake and eat it too (new energy system and economic growth based largely on services)

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he dematerialization of production by the service economy is complemented by an equally or more important dematerialization of needs. The growing centrality of services results from the fact that once basic material requirements are met, the aspiration is released for the satisfaction of higher order, non-material needs – communication, information, education, healthcare, entertainment, recreation, and culture – which are not only far less demanding of material inputs but also far less limited in their growth potential.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Graeme', 'Y')es that's right but you didn't read what I posted. We can still have our cake and eat it too (new energy system and economic growth based largely on services)