- In the last fifteen years the energy capacity of lithiumion batteries has tripled, and the cost per unit of stored energy has fallen by a factor of ten.
The consequences of such shifts are hard to overstate. If Tesla and GM’s forecasts are correct, then by the early 2020s a battery pack for a new electric car with a range of 200 miles could cost as little as £5,000. That would make the price of electric cars directly competitive with petrol versions while remaining on a downward curve. That is before considering how they’ll be cheaper to run, insure and maintain over the course of their life. A generation from now, purchasing the energy powering your car may seem counter-intuitive, and a generation thereafter it will border on absurd.
That energy storage technology is subject to the experience curve just as much as renewable generation is important, because in any transition beyond fossil fuels – and towards extreme supply, where it becomes permanently cheaper – both will be necessary. If the experience curve persists across both, even just for another decade or two, the paradigm shift in energy will be every bit as disruptive as the rise and difusion of fossil fuels after the early 1800s.
Solar and the Global South
Given renewable energy is a twenty-first-century technology, many would presume its efects, as with the mobile phone and internet, will be felt most profoundly across the Global North – at least initially. And yet it is in the poorer countries of the Global South where renewables, especially solar, will prove most transformational. In the right political framework they could even end the historic imbalance, present since colonialism and profoundly deepened by the Second Disruption, between the world’s wealthiest and poorest nations.
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