Good news! We Can Meet All Our Energy Needs from Solar in 20 Years

Good news! I just read an article on the predictions by Ray Kurzweil a known futurist who laid out the law of accelerating returns, which states that technology improves at exponential rates. He made a string of dead-on predictions about computing in the 80s -- that a computer would beat a man at chess by 1998, and that the world would link networks into some crazy globally connected system sometime in the mid-90s.

Now, Kurzweil is talking solar. In the following interview with Grist http://www.grist.org/article/2011-02-19-futurist-ray-kurzweil-isnt-worried-about-climate-change, he explains why he's not worried about climate change, and how renewable energy sources will become dominant much, much sooner than we think.

"One of my primary theses is that information technologies grow exponentially in capability and power and bandwidth and so on. If you buy an iPhone today, it's twice as good as two years ago for half the cost. That is happening with solar energy -- it is doubling every two years. And it didn't start two years ago, it started 20 years ago. Every two years, we have twice as much solar energy in the world. Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly ... we are only a few years away from parity.

So right now it's at half a percent of the world's energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it's only eight more doublings before it meets a 100 percent of the world's energy needs. So that's 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we'll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been underway for 20 years."