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100% of what? to look at it another way, when will we have so much solar energy production that it's hard to find a market for more solar energy at costs similar to present plant costs? right now a megawatt-hour of solar power costs usually about 25 dollars, half to a third of the cost of a megawatt-hour of power from coal or oil. the energy transition has, roughly speaking, cut the cost of energy in half. in sunny places, it's even cheaper. that means many energy-intensive industrial processes that were previously unprofitable have just become very profitable. how will that reshape the economy? it's hard to say in detail, but clearly, as those ramp up, energy demand will increase if you think the answer is '100% of current world electrical generation' or even '100% of current world marketed energy consumption' you've imported the implicit assumption that this seismic change in the energy market, unprecedented since the early days of the steam engine, won't reshape the economy at all and won't increase energy demand at all. this seems like a very implausible assumption a more plausible endpoint is '100% of the sunlight that hits the earth'—once we start approaching that endpoint, we'll have problems like oxygen-producing algae dying off in the ocean because it's not getting any sun. that starts to become a problem at roughly 1000× current world marketed energy production, 10 doublings, so, around 02050 |