As the legendary philosopher Yogi Berra famously said, making predictions is tough, especially about the future.  Always in motion, the future is, and hard to see, obscured as it is as by a dense fog.  Especially difficult to see are those changes that will occur in the future to radically displace old ways of living, which improve upon them not merely in increments but as utterly transformative and novel concepts.  One reason we might fail to see some of these changes coming is that they might not occur until the new concept crosses some critical threshold, and therefore ensuing changes would be impossible to predict merely by looking at past trends.  In the case of energy, for instance, we might not see solar photovoltaics taken seriously until, slowly at first but just as surely, market by market, the cost and performance of PV systems becomes dramatically superior to old, cumbersome, and polluting technologies.  But once they reach that point, the shift in their favor might be so rapid that the current focus on “integration” of new technologies might utterly vanish, as present systems become entirely obsolete.

One of the most important concepts to understand about the relationship between price and production in any system is the notion of economies of scale.  That is to say, as the production volume of any given product increases, the unit cost of production decreases in proportion, barring such intervening factors as disruptions in trading or supply scarcity.  The improvements in cost as well as performance derive from a combination of technological and process improvements, supply chain efficiencies, and increased competition as more different players become involved in the manufacturing of a given product.  One of the best and most famous examples of economies of scale is of course Moore’s Law, a theory developed around the middle of the twentieth century that accurately forecast the growth in performance for transistors and was later applied to data storage and semiconductors.  The same trends can be observed in other areas as well, including noncomputing uses of semiconductor materials: 

Here comes the sun?

Of course, don’t get me wrong: these kinds of changes don’t happen automatically, and it is fallacious to assume that nascent but potentially transformative industries must arise from some kind of “natural” free market or purely individual choice in order to have meaningful effects, as if to deny the role that group dynamics and cooperation have played in the prior evolution of humanity or of any other species.  For instance, in 1950, the very idea of space travel itself seemed outlandish to almost any casual observer, and nobody imagined that within a few short decades we would be sending people and satellites into orbit with a great deal of regularity, let alone that free market dynamics alone would support such an insane proposition.  There is no denying that space exploration has radically shifted many aspects of the way we live, and yet it is only today that we are even beginning to see the private sector talk about taking on the largest share of the burden for continuing to advance the technology.  So, even setting aside the question of whether we are continuing to subsidize old technologies, particularly by ignoring their environmental consequences (yes), still, we should not use the existence of some future singularity or grid parity, whatever you like to call it, as an excuse to avoid making good policy choices that nurture those technologies we can already see today as being the source of radically transformative paradigm shifts in the future.

The biggest problem I have with predictions, especially those made with the kind of sure-minded confidence you tend to find in the area of energy and natural resources (have a look at some of the claims floating around the blogosphere if you don’t believe me), is that nobody can possibly anticipate the truly transformative changes that will reshape the way we live, that will replace old systems to such an extent that new patterns based on new systems become utterly impossible to predict.  How could anyone, for instance, have anticipated the rise of the iPhone without knowing about cellular phones, or predicted the wild success of Google, Wikipedia and Facebook without knowledge of the Internet?  Futurists have taken to referring to such dramatic uncertainties as singularities, akin to the the center of a black hole: you know something is going on back there, but you can’t see it, and the laws under which it operates are so different from those to which we are accustomed that making predictions about its behavior is an exercise in futility.

However, even while past performance is no guarantee of future results, there are still a few points we can extrapolate from history in this area.  To me, asking how we can make tomorrow’s technologies fit in with our existing systems, like the electric grid or an oil-based economy, is like asking how to make the Internet compatible with telegraph wire.  We shouldn’t be asking how to improve upon existing technologies and systems; we should be asking ourselves, “What are the technologies and systems we need?“  When DARPA developed the first primitive computer networks, its researchers and engineers weren’t worried about problems with integrating the new systems with existing room-sized mainframes and vacuum tubes; they were thinking about new possibilities and concepts that couldn’t even possibly be imagined in the absence of the system they were creating.  And even they could never have imagined how big of a game-changer they were really creating.

I believe most observers, and especially those who foresee nothing but doom and gloom as the outcome of predicaments such as the peaking and decline of fossil fuel production, are stuck in a rut of thinking about technologies like solar photovoltaics and energy storage as merely poor substitutes, as last-ditch efforts to save ourselves from an otherwise inevitable economic collapse.  Such projections fail to give new technologies proper credit for being better than the old ones, and in so doing they consign us to continued enslavement to the dinosaur technologies, as if they had magical properties and could never be supplanted by something newer and better.  We should move past thinking about getting “beyond fossil fuels” and start thinking instead about how to get beyond the beyond.

Hence why, while I cannot and do not intend to deny the facts of our predicament today, I still believe the greatest failure in humanity’s energy crisis is a failure of the imagination.  We’ll never get anywhere with that kind of can’t-do attitude.

Greetings from the future, Earthlings.  Ah, there is still so much left for you to learn!