“The coming era of unlimited—and free—clean energy”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8072
Vivek Wadhwa —former software entrepreneur, present technological evangelist, and recent author of a Washington Post blog piece predicting planetwide energy transformation—gets plenty of exposure.
Two and a half years ago, the San Jose Mercury News published a column under the headline “Vivek Wadhwa emerges as Silicon Valley’s most provocative voice.” At Stanford University, where Wadhwa serves as a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance , web pages itemize his national media ubiquity. He has another academic affiliation at Duke University’s engineering school.
Headlines and subheads for his other Post pieces amplify the techno-optimism of his energy-prediction piece, itself headlined “The coming era of unlimited—and free—clean energy.” Here are two examples:
* “It’s a beautiful time to be alive and educated : Tremendous advances in technology are letting us dramatically improve the human condition.”
* “How today’s technology is rapidly catching up to Star Trek : Science fiction is becoming reality given the rapid pace of development in technology.”
Wadhwa premises his plentiful-energy prediction on an analogy with cell phones. After tracing early reactions to their potential, he writes:
The experts are saying the same about solar energy now. They note that after decades of development, solar power hardly supplies 1 percent of the world’s energy needs. They say that solar is inefficient, too expensive to install, and unreliable, and will fail without government subsidies. They too are wrong. Solar will be as ubiquitous as cellular phones are.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil notes that solar power has been doubling every two years for the past 30 years—as costs have been dropping. He says solar energy is only six doublings—or less than 14 years—away from meeting 100 percent of today’s energy needs. Energy usage will keep increasing, so this is a moving target. But, by Kurzweil’s estimates, inexpensive renewable sources will provide more energy than the world needs in less than 20 years. Even then, we will be using only one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the Earth.
In places such as Germany, Spain, Portugal, Australia, and the Southwest United States, residential-scale solar production has already reached “grid parity” with average residential electricity prices.
Wadhwa also predicts breakthroughs for wind, biomass, thermal, tidal, waste-breakdown energy, and, crucially, battery technology for energy storage. He predicts that the fossil-fuel industry will decline and fail. The environment will improve. Cheap energy will overcome water scarcity by enabling cost-effective processing of seawater. Farmers will “grow hydroponic fruits and vegetables in vertical farms located near consumers"—that is, in “glass buildings without the need for pesticides” and with recycling of “nutrients and materials to ensure there is no ecological impact.”
At the end, Wadhwa echoes, in effect, a recent comment by former President Clinton. Wadhwa asserts, “We are surely heading into the era of abundance that Peter Diamandis has written about—the era when the basic needs of humanity are met through advancing technologies.” On CNN, Clinton recently recommended Diamandis’s book “Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think.” Clinton said:
[W]hile the headlines are really bad in the world today, the trend lines are pretty good. Extreme poverty is down. The health care is improving dramatically around the world. There are developments now which make me believe we might be able to do what we did in the ‘90s, which is to use technological developments to create more jobs than we lose. For the last few months, for the first time in literally more than a decade, 40 percent of the new jobs have been in higher wage categories. I think people should read this and get some good ideas.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.