[angleofrepose]

Thank you and other commenters for the great rundowns here. I'm interested in a related question and I wonder if you or others could point me in the right direction: why was the mainstream consensus around solar power (and/or batteries) apparently so wrong for so long? More specifically -- and maybe a better question -- why didn't progress in solar and batteries happen sooner?

I'm less interested in blame than in a systems analysis of how in the last half century powerful players seem to have missed the opportunity to start earlier investment in solar and battery technology. Solar and batteries are unique in energy infrastructure, as even any casual observer knows by now, and is certain to change many aspects of politics, industry and culture. It seems an inevitability that energy infrastructure will evolve from large complex components towards small and simple components, and I'm interested in engaging with the history of why "now" is the moment, rather than decades ago.

[pjc50]

> why didn't progress in solar and batteries happen sooner?

The rate of progress in cost reduction has been astonishing. It's unlike anything except Moore's Law. This catches people out.

As well as the usual suspects: cheap fossil fuels, failure to take global warming seriously, belief that nuclear power would see similar exponential cost reduction rather than opposite, and of course anti green politics.

But if 95% cost reduction is the result of not taking it seriously, would taking it seriously earlier have been even better? Hard to say.

[angleofrepose]

Right! Good points for optimism here, and acknowledging broken mental models.

We have silicon solar modules in the 1950s, Moore's law in the 1960s. Another take on the question then: today we use Moore's law to describe progress in solar modules, to what extent was that realization possible in the 1960s from the fundamentals, or "first principles"?

If it was clear, why did we not see rapid prioritization of solar and energy storage technology research? Or did we and I don't know the actual history? Or what influences am I undervaluing or not recognizing?

If it wasn't clear, why not? Gaming out many positive impacts of solar technology feels easy today in a way it appears was not easy in the past. Why wasn't it clear in the past?

[KennyBlanken]

Battery progress was in some ways slowed but also accelerated by oil companies who kept buying up patents on solar and battery stuff that looked promising, and then sat on the patents, refusing to license it.

One oil company bought Cobasys, which owned all the NiMH patents. Thereafter, Cobasys refused to license NiMH batteries to anyone making a vehicle, except large ones like transit busses. Several early EVs used NiMH batteries until Cobasys was acquired and set up the restrictions.

This really lit a fire under researchers and battery industry to try and improve lithium ion, which had hit the market in the early 90's. Once the price of Lithium Ion started falling, the market very quickly forgot about NiMH batteries. In about ten years prices have fallen to one fifth of what they were. That fall has slowed, but it's still dropping.

[mjamesaustin]

It's a false assumption that technological progress happens automatically or even that it's based upon the passage of time.

Progress happens as a result of many choices made by individuals to invest time and energy solving problems. Why is solar rapidly improving now? Because way more people are invested in making it better.

Nascent technologies almost always face an uphill battle because they compete against extremely optimized legacy technologies while themselves having no optimization at first. We only get to the current rapid period of growth because enough people pushed us through the early part of the S curve.

[angleofrepose]

Sure, that makes sense. This is where I'm coming from with my interest in history:

I heard an interesting argument somewhere that solar cells are an ideal manufactured good. Whether you are building a module for a calculator or a GW scale plant, the modules are the same. This is fundamentally different for steam turbines. On the "concrete-internal combustion engine" spectrum of complexity, solar modules are closer to concrete and turbines are closer to ICEs.

Shouldn't this have led to a special interest in advancing solar module research? Or widespread understanding that eventually the unique set of attributes that define a solar module would lead to it's takeover of a significant portion of global energy generation? Shouldn't that have been apparent from the earliest days of photovoltaic research as a sort of philosophical truth before the advances in material science, extraction or manufacturing of the last fifty years?

[adgjlsfhk1]

I think another important part is that solar has low minimum useful quantities and customization. Lots of the problem with nuclear power is that you only need ~100 to power the US, and each one takes years to build, so getting scale is basically impossible. With a 50-100 year lifespan per plant, that means you only get to build 1-2 a year, and you can't learn much from the 5 you've most recently started since they're still under construction.

[epistasis]

Solar and batteries got cheaper when we scaled up and built a lot. You have to pay current prices to get the next price drop, because it's all learning by doing.

If we had pushed harder in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, solar might have gotten cheaper sooner. Solar fit in at the edges of the market as it grew: remote locations for power, or small scale settings where running a wire is inconvenient or impractical. The really big push that put solar over the edge was Germany's energiwende public policy that encouraged deploying a ton of solar in a country with exceptionally poor solar resources; but even with that promise of a market, massive scale up was guaranteed.

It's in many ways a collective action problem. Even in this thread, in 2025 you will see people wondering when we will have effective battery technology, because they have been misinformed for so long that batteries are ineffective that they don't see the evidence even in the linked article.

Also, most people do not understand technology learning curves, and how exponential growth changes things. Even in Silicon Valley, where the religion of the singularity is prevalent and where everyone is familiar with Moore's law, the propaganda against solar and batteries has been so strong that many do not realize the tech curves that solar and batteries enjoy.

A lot of this comes down to who has the money to spend on public influence too, which is largely the fossil fuel industry, who spends massive amounts on both politicians and in setting up a favorable information environment in the media. Solar and batteries are finally getting significant revenues, but they have been focused more on execution than on buying politics and buying media. They have benefited from environmental advocates that want to decarbonize, without a doubt, but that doesn't have the same effect as a very targeted media propaganda campaign that results in zealots that, whenever they see an article about climate change, call up their local paper and chew out the management with screaming. Much of the media is very afraid of right wing nuts on the matter and it puts a huge tilt on the coverage in the mass media in favor of fossil fuels and against climate science.

[angleofrepose]

Indeed. You widen the conversation here, and remind me of the idea that moneyed influence is underrepresented in analysis and understanding of the world. Maybe the most appropriate way to understand big questions is who is funding the various players.

I like to think about "learn by doing". While I have of course lived it, I try to think of counterpoints. It seems clear that solar owes it's growth to Germany and California policies which subsidized the global solar industry with taxes on their economies, most disproportionately placed on individual ratepayers. But why couldn't solar research have been long-term funded based on it's fundamental value? Talk about national security, or geopolitical stability -- especially post 1970s! Skip the intermediate and expensive buildouts of the 2000s, failed companies heavily subsidized and fund research instead to hopefully bring the late 2010s forward in time?

What's a good model here, or concrete example? We see the same side of the history in electric vehicles. I think Tesla and Rivian, to pick two, both lost money on every sale in early years. Why not skip that expensive step in company history, and develop better products to sell at a profit from the beginning of mass manufacturing? Are there industries or technologies where this expensive/slow process went the other way?