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0 pointspfdietz1y ago0 comments

Smil was wildly wrong about the trajectory of PV improvement. In his defense, so was almost everyone else.

I found the following comment about Smil:

"There is a way how to evaluate the quality of prophets, seers and visionaries. Find their 5,10,15 years old predictions. I own the Smil’s book: Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate (2010). So have a look how good prophet he was 10 years in advance and focus on photovoltaics (I own Czech translation of the book, so I need to re-translate his text back to English, I hope I will not skew his ideas too much):

* To get 1 PWh/year of electricity you need to install about 450 GW worth of solar panels. You need dozens of years to acomplish such task. Reality check: 3 years in current speed, in the future probably faster.

* The cost of PV panels fell from 5 USD/W in 2000 to 4.5 USD/W in 2009. He don’t see much perspective of price plummeting as predicted f.e. by Al Gore (who cited the learning curve, Smil counted with 0.05 USD/W in 2020) or by PV industry (1.5 USD/W in 2020). Smil predicted that PV panels would be 25% cheaper in 2020 and 50% in 2030. Reality check: Current price of PV panels is ~0.2 W/USD. While Smil wrote the book manufacturers finally scaled their production of polysilicone and PV cells to cover the demand. Competition among them set the cost of PV panel on the freefall trajectory. PV panels cost less than he predicted for 2030 in 2011.

How credible are such visionaries?"

I will add that in 2023, 447 GW of PV was installed globally. So, we're at the point where Smil's "dozens of years" is being done each and every year.

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agurk1y ago

I'm somewhat confused with the analysis of his predictions of the price of PV panels.

Is it saying Smil said (is that meant to be countered with?) PV would cost 0.05 USD/W in 2020? Or was that meant to be Al Gore claiming that price? It seems it can't be his predicted reduction as he said 25% less, so did he want to say that is would be 3.38 USD/W in 2020 (75% of the 2009 price)?

And the current cost - 0.2W/USD is 5 USD a Watt - are the units reversed there? A quick google shows a variety of prices, with nothing being 20 cents a Watt [0] - $0.5-1.50 for the less efficient thin film types quoted here. All seem quite a bit cheaper than $4.5 a watt though.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/cost-of-solar-...

ZeroGravitas1y ago

It's hard to tell if Smil is a grumpy old academic who's been catapulted to fame because his cranky opinions happened to line up with some political faction (like Jordan Peterson) or if he's been fundamentally warped by the money and attention available to those who take certain positions (like a slightly later Jordan Peterson).

His doomerism and degrowth perspective points to the early JP, writing articles mocking Obama for lack of progress with EVs points to the latter.

Either way he managed to convince Bill Gates to massively misinvest in climate solutions and while doing so loudly bad mouth all the actual solutions so that alone is a massive net negative for humanity (and, more parochially, for the USA, which is super ironic given his anti-communist stance--another weird JP parallel--as he's been super helpful to the Chinese by letting them solve all the problems he claimed were inpossible and dissuaded US companies from investing in).

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