forecasting
Wind Farm Cost Reductions Since the Mid-1990s
You know that one of my favorite sports is bagging on forecasts of all types, so when I come across one that’s pretty decent, I think it’s worth highlighting. Here, we see that the Department of Energy’s 1996 forecast (drawn from here) does pretty well. They overprojected the price declines up until 2000, but as [...]
Steve Chu Posts His Nuclear Rationale on Facebook
Following the Department of Energy’s announcement of a loan guarantee for a new nuclear plant, the Nobel Prize-winning head of the agency, Steven Chu, laid out his rationale for nuclear in clear and plain language.
It’s a pretty conventional argument: 1) “no single technology will provide all of the answers,” which is obviously true, and 2) [...]
Finding Better Ways of Thinking About the Future
Forecasts about the nation’s energy future have not been reliable. This post explores what went wrong and how can we find better ways to imagine what might be.
Serious Futurists
In working on a chapter about the visions that both professional forecasters and regular cultural observers held in the middle of the 20th century, I’ve stumbled into a whole field that seems underexposed these days: “future studies.”
While many people in places like San Francisco are familiar with some futurists like Paul Saffo, Jamais Cascio, [...]
Have renewables performed as well as people hoped?
In a word, no. Renewable technologies haven’t achieved anywhere close to the market penetration proponents hoped, according to some of the best work I’ve seen on the topic from the thinktank Resources for the Future.
BUT, solar and wind technologies have been chasing moving regulatory and cost targets while dealing with very inconsistent government research, [...]
Energy Predictions for the Year 2000: The Executive, The Analyst, and The Professor
At a conference on “Energy, Economic Growth, and the Environment,” hosted by Resources for the Future in Washington D.C. in April of 1971, Philip Sporn, chief of American Electric Power, presented himself to the crowd as a realist.
Joel Darmstader1, an RFF analyst, had prepared a packet of information on energy consumption trends and patterns in [...]
1971: “the internal combustion engine will be banned from the central city by the year 2000″
Here’s former Texas A&M geologist, Earl Cook, and his full quote from a 1971 article in Scientific American.
The automobile engine and its present fuel simply cannot be cleaned up sufficiently to make it an acceptable urban citizen. It seems clear that the internal-combustion engine will be banned from the central city by the year 2000; [...]
Is there an energy consumption sweet spot? Yes.
People tend to argue about energy demand by saying “X is inevitable, therefore we should do Y.” Backed up with technical analyses and some historical facts, perhaps a curve or two, it sure seems convincing. One of the best energy lessons from the past is that people are tremendously bad at predicting Xs, and so [...]
Two DOE Graphs: Historically Things Changed, But in The Future Nothing Will
The top graph shows constant change in the energy supply over the last one hundred years. The bottom graph shows no change in energy supply over the next 20+ years.
“While the Nation’s energy history is one of large-scale change as new forms of energy were developed,” the DOE writes, “the outlook for the next couple [...]
1955 Forecast: World Energy Usage 60 Times Our Actual Usage
In a 1951 report for the Atomic Energy Commission, Palmer C. Putnam, inventor of the one of the world’s largest wind turbines and the DUKW amphibious transport vehicle, made some seemingly reasonable predictions about the the world energy system.
He noted the world’s “illiterate subsistence-farming populations” were “in demographic transition” to urbanized, higher-energy lifestyles. Meanwhile, “everything [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
