While humanity has possessed the technology to capture and store this energy for decades, until recently it remained uneconomical and inconvenient compared to fossil fuels. Yet in the opening decades of the twenty-first century that has begun to change, meaning that just as the Third Disruption is powered by extreme supply in information and labour, the same also applies for energy.
A Quiet Revolution
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that solar energy has been with us since the earliest days of the Third Disruption, with photovoltaic cells first used on NASA’s Vanguard 1 satellite in 1958. While an impressive feat of engineering, each panel only generated a maximum half watt at a time, meaning energy cost per unit was many thousands of dollars – far more than fossil fuels. By the middle of the 1970s, and as a result of the experience curve, that figure had fallen dramatically to around \$100 a watt – still uncompetitive, but an eye-catching improvement.
More recently, however, solar costs have changed beyond all recognition with compounding improvements in priceperformance meaning a watt of solar energy in sunnier countries can cost as little as fifty cents. Few disagree that this trend is only set to continue, and with global solar capacity doubling every two years – it increased by a factor of one hundred between 2004 and 2015 – it is likely that the dividends of the experience curve have much further to go. Installations of PV have grown by 40 per cent every year over the last few decades while in the UK, remarkably, 99 per cent of solar capacity has been installed since 2010.
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