The Democratization of Energy
The future is incredibly hard to predict, but of a few things we can all be certain. Death, taxes and now, the continued improvement in the collection and storage of energy. Solar paired with the progress in battery technology will open up a plethora of economic opportunity. The electric-ification of the automobile, for example, now able to accelerate faster than any gas powered production car, means we can not only provide power to our homes, but we can also power our transportation. Siting a solar power plant at your house creates something we call the “democratization” of the grid. We’re so used to buying power from a centralized provider, we haven’t really been able to imagine the alternative.
In a recent article for GreenTechMedia.com, Andre Beebe writes- “The key catalyst to allowing for the electrification of everything is improved battery technology. To move into widespread use, we need both lower costs and better density. As I wrote in my piece on lithium-ion batteries, we expect the cost curve for batteries over the next decade to mimic what we’ve seen in solar over the same time frame. If we’re right, we’re on the cusp of an order-of-magnitude reduction in the costs of energy storage in almost all shapes and sizes.”
He is correct that we are on the cusp of a complete shift in the way we resource our energy needs and the way we think about the effects of that resourcing. There is no way to predict how fast this change will come, only that it will come as long as we insist on “distributed” solar (otherwise known as rooftop solar). Something that used to be considered a nice thing that hippies did for the for the environment, has now become one of the most liberating technological advances in human history. The more we can get away from fossil fuels and into renewables, the longer and healthier all our lives will be.