[DaniFong]

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I think natural resource constraints and tribalism / nationalism are the greatest chronic threats we face.

Energy tech and communications tech try to solve these, respectively; most funding, research and commercialization appears to happen here (although most deployment happens globally).

I've been studying where things are happening from my admittedly skewed vantage point for quite a long time. It does still seem that the vast majority (>60%) of activity is happening in the bay area.

[justincormack]

Thats a very SV response of course.

I don't think SV is at the forefront of energy tech, don't have any figures to hand, but I would put Germany way ahead of SV.

Communications tech, yeah maybe, but it is very well dispersed now. Social change created by this? Less so, the US is trying to reinforce the existing consumer society through better advertising. Much of the rest of the world is experimenting with using new technology to help change society, from the Arab Spring to M5S and the Pirate Party and so on.

[three14]

This is one of those occasions where it's worth checking the poster's profile. Danielle Fong is "cofounder, chief scientist, lightsailenergy.com" and probably does know a lot of people in SV working on energy tech.

[DaniFong]

Silicon Valley certainly outperforms Germany in new energy tech. It's not even comparable. Germany just spends more on deployment.

[Retric]

There is little need for better energy tech at this point, it's all a question of deployment.

Edit: That is to say wind and solar can both be cheaper than coal right now depending on location and how you calculate the cost of money etc. Which means we are over the tipping point and it's just a question of how much and how quickly to invest not the need for some great breakthrough.

[DaniFong]

It's not possible to economically power the world with non-fossil fuel based sources based on current prices. We are between a factor of 2 off, optimistically, and more likely a factor of 5 off (floored by extraction and processing costs.)

I don't know where you got your data or how you're doing your analysis, but you're incorrect on this one.

[Retric]

If by power you mean electricity then your simply wrong. According to a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) between El Paso Electric Company and First Solar, electricity will be sold from First Solar’s thin-film solar panels to El Paso Electric Company for 5.8 cents per kWh http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/03/thin-film-solar-power-to... Let's compare that with http://www.heco.com/portal/site/heco/menuitem.508576f78baa14...; and say there is no way to run an economy on renewable energy.

That said, scaling things up quickly is a hard problem but slow things down and many problems go away. Realistically, rather than transporting electricity to industry a lot of industry is going to move to where there is cheap power. Also, transportation is a separate issue boats and airplanes are not going to be 'green' any time soon.

[DaniFong]

Let me try again. Maybe it will enlighten some other readers.

You're cherry picking some of the outermost outliers of both of their ranges, ignoring the cost of storage and transmission and distribution infrastructure, and ignoring the fact that the price of fossil fuel could just decline to the cost of extraction processing and transport as we produce replacements. The cost of coal + extraction nears 2 cents per kwh.