Perhaps the most famous forecast in energy history is that atomic power would be “too cheap to meter.”
On September 16, 1954, Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, told a group of science writers, “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter,” thanks to The Friendly Atom.
Was he serious? Some people say no, that he just got a little carried away. Others — notably Steve Cohn in his book Too Cheap to Meter — have shown that the idea that nuclear power would become incredibly cheap permeated the nuclear industry. Maybe not today, the dour realists assured us, but some day soon. That day has never come to pass.
The problem, as Vaclav Smil points out in Energy at the Crossroads, is not limited to the nuclear industry. Pretty much everybody has been terrible at forecasting technological progress, energy demand, and the cost of energy.
“[F]or more than 100 years long-term energy forecasts of energy affairs — no matter if they were concerned with specific inventions and subsequent commercial diffusion of new conversion techniques or if they tried to chart broad sectoral, national, or global consumption trends — have, save for a few proverbial exceptions confirming the rule, a manifest record of failure,” Smil thunders.
Having seen a few thousand forecasts, I’d tend to agree with the man. But I want to try an experiment out on Inventing Green. I’m going to look through my books and documents and post every historical forecast that I can.
I welcome your additions from across the energy spectrum, no matter whether a given estimate missed high or low. Specifically, I’m looking for individually testable statements of what the future is going to be like. Like, say, $0.40 per peak watt solar power by the year 2000.
I just found this website, and I think it’s very interesting; it’s recording the history of a debate that people don’t tend to think about historically. I’d like a bit more analysis, though. Some of the failure of green technology has been due to economic and physical limits. Other problems, however, have been due to active political and social intervention by coal and oil magnates. I’d like to see more on why certain technologies failed – i.e., whether it was due to the physics and the cost-benefit issues, or whether it was due to political gerrymandering.
You’re right, Alex. The why is the important thing — and it’s what I’m working out in the book. The blog is notes on that adventure. Because it’s not really easy to parse. One chapter deals with costs and how it’s difficult to separate politics and cost. (Un)official government backing, for example, reduces the cost of capital to a project developer. That reduces the cost of the project, but in ways that are very difficult to quantify.
Stay with me, though, because I’ll be posting bits of analysis from the book more frequently as they get worked out in greater detail.