Solar Power Will Blow You Away. Wind, too.
The future of energy consumption will be electrical. The advent of high-speed rail and electric vehicles means that demand for electricity will skyrocket in the coming decade. Something will have to make up the difference between current consumption and future consumption - and that market will be huge. In 2009, most of the largest companies in the world were suppliers of Oil & Gas. In the coming decade, as the market for energy grows, cleaner new technology will capture more of that market.
Thin-film photovoltaics deserve special mention here because of recent dramatic improvements in technology and manufacturing capability. Solar inks, organic and dye-sensitized solar cells (also known as Grätzel cells) are revolutionizing the sector by making it possible to manufacture efficient photovoltaics without expensive chemical vapour deposition (CVD) or traditional lithographic semiconductor processes. First Solar (a thin-film company using CVD) is already producing solar cells at less than $1 per watt; other, newer companies like California's Nanosolar are predicting production costs as low as 10 cents per watt. That same watt of solar capacity, once installed, will reliably produce $1 in electricity every year* for the next 25-45 years. Just use your squeegee, and clean it when you wash the windows.
Cheap, reliable, decentralized photovoltaics and other so-called renewables will compete at cost with expensive turbine-based power plants in the coming years. As new cap and trade legislation makes CO2 emission expensive, we'll see a progressive shift to sustainable electricity generation. Nuclear, wind, and solar power will come to account for more and more of our supply.
*based on conservative10% capacity factor, electricity price at $0.11/kwh
