In part two of this series, I extend the historical and biological concepts articulated in Part 1 into predictions for the near future. Although Part 1 is quite lengthy, I advise reviewing it before you proceed with this entry, just to get a sense of my underlying thinking and overall trajectory. In the current diary, I take a look at the present state of humanity from a high-level perspective and apply energy-maximization principles to predict change over the next decade. In each subsequent Part, the scope of time examined will increase by an order of magnitude and specific states increasingly blended into recursive patterns of long-term change.
The core principle of this diary series will be prediction based on underlying physical causation - in particular, to resolve future large-scale changes in civilization caused by ongoing imbalances in energy potential. For this Part, which concerns developments over the next decade, the focus will be much more on specific technologies and accumulating economic pressures, as there will likely not have been time for radical changes in the basic state of society to occur. Luckily for you, the reader, I have neither the expertise nor inclination to be rigorously quantitative in this analysis.
I should also note that none of these predictions on any scale accounts for or rules out temporary catastrophes due to price shocks, natural disasters, or political developments, but these are merely the "punctuation" in punctuated equilibria: The dynamic balance over time continues to determine the overall shape of change. Even in apocalyptic scenarios, without the total - and I mean numerically absolute - annihilation of the human species, technological development over large time scales will continue despite intervening years, decades, or centuries of Dark Age decline. I therefore do not concern myself with such scenarios, as they are simply a distraction from rather than an exception to the overall pattern.
Table of Contents
(Current part in bold)
I. The Energy History of Life (Part 1)
II. The Energy History of Humanity (Part 1)
III. The Next Decade
IV. The Next Century
V. The Next Millennium
VI. 10,000 Years
VII. 100,000 Years
VIII. Mark: One Million Years
Pretend that you are looking at the current state of human civilization from a great distance in time, and characterize it in terms that would seem obvious from our own perspective: First, we depend entirely on the energy resources of a single planet, and have grown to occupy virtually all of its environments. Second, the overwhelming majority of our energy comes from mining and transporting time-concentrated biomatter or its gaseous byproducts - i.e., fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas. And third, those resources are overwhelmingly acquired and regulated either by nation-states, economic alliances of nation-states, or publicly-traded transnational corporations.
This figure is from a 2006 International Energy Agency (IEA) report, and remains largely accurate in 2010 despite a somewhat larger Renewables profile today:
Two important facts are immediately revealed: Ninety-one percent (91%) of global energy sources in 2006 came from chemical byproducts of solar energy - Petroleum, Coal, Natural Gas, and Biomass - and 86.5% (the fossil fuels + nuclear) come from non-renewable, regionally-concentrated deposits that have to be located, mined, and transported. The first of these facts is interesting because of the growing direct utilization of solar energy - i.e., tapping into the same underlying energy base without the environmental, political, or sustainability issues of relying on chemical middle-men. And the second is interesting for its political ramifications: Namely, regional concentration of energy resources leading to economic dependency, predatory behavior, and distorted government policy.
Even without the threat of climate change and the high cost of securing radioactive waste, both of the above facts would create long-term economic pressure away from concentrated, non-renewable sources of energy. For instance, when a nation-state grows beyond the ability of its current energy base to support, it has to establish its priorities among three concurrent policy tracks: Imposing political limits on further growth, becoming dependent on external resources, or developing renewables that can be efficiently scaled to its needs.
The third option is clearly favored on a long-term strategic basis, but may not be economically or politically practical over the short-term, so by default we find that a given state will typically become dependent rather than checking its own growth (which would also require an act of political will) or mobilizing for a radical energy transformation. As a result, a substantial amount of time may pass - and a great deal of conflict and environmental damage occur - before a nation seriously commits to transforming its energy infrastructure, and even then it will do so gradually.
I am, of course, generalizing from the past few decades of American history, but the pattern appears to be common: Even nations leading the charge on renewable energy such as Germany have not taken any radical steps, although their measures are stronger than those taken by the US. More importantly, even when significant funding is invested in technological research, there is a long lead-time between developments in the laboratory and implementation in practice. This is true in almost all fields, but is especially true with respect to large industrial endeavors such as electric utilities and manufacturers of high-volume components.
My baseline prediction for the next decade will therefore not be very surprising: There will be a continual increase of investment in renewable energy at every point in development from the laboratory to operational projects, but discoveries and innovations will occur much more rapidly than they can be tested in practice. In consequence, we are likely to see an explosive and accelerating buildup of technological potential far out of proportion to the modest progress made in infrastructural change. However, this potential will be largely invisible to people not involved in the industry or energy policymaking, and most conspicuous progress will involve the completion of projects already underway.
The most important systemic change, however, will be the increasing division between decentralized and utility-scale energy generation: Although the latter will comprise the bulk of highly visible projects, the former will be the overwhelming beneficiary of the buildup in technological potential. The number of energy self-sufficient homes and businesses is trivial today, and will probably still be small ten years from now, but the growth rate will be explosive due to the increasing cheapness and low operational cost of high-volume modular systems as compared to large, centralized utilities. Moreover, there will be far more homes and businesses that are partially self-sufficient and make use of some form of local energy-harvesting technology, be it rooftop solar panels, wind turbines, or both.
Fossil fuel companies will attempt to stay on top of changes in the energy sector by funding or purchasing renewable utilities (as indeed they are already doing), and will exercise their political influence to see that government policy favors these over more decentralized options. The reason is that the more centralized the infrastructure, the more oligopolistic the industry will be, and thus the more easily the existing energy sector can adapt its business practices to the new conditions.
In other words, these oil, gas, and coal company spinoffs will attempt to guide the transition to renwables in order to maximize net profits over their entire portfolio rather than taking the path that leads to the cheapest clean energy in the shortest amount of time. As a result, renewable energy prices will remain higher than they might otherwise be, and growth in the sector will be slower than it ultimately will be once decentralized renewables come into their own. However, the existence and growth of these non-utility alternatives will continue regardless, and evolve relatively quickly due to their highly commercial nature.
Due to these factors, I would say that the next decade of growth in this field will be dominated by utilities and manufacturers of conservatively-designed systems: Gigantic wind turbines, large-scale solar thermal installations, geothermal plants, and common polycrystalline silicon PV fields located in desert regions. Technologies aimed at sheer volume, such as flexible PV printed on rolls or small wind turbines meant to power individual buildings, will play a minority role over this time period. Solar water heaters, however, will probably find more rapid adoption due to their simplicity and obviousness.
Despite growing more slowly than utilities, decentralized power will form the kernel of a long-term social shift toward both economic localization and radical mobility: I.e., the generalized capacity to use local resources almost anywhere makes entirely new regions economically viable, and revives older ones that had fallen on hard times due to the collapse of regionally-extended economies. Over the long-term, this could mean that people have less of an economic reason to travel, but more of a cultural reason as bland exurbs begin to develop into real communities with substantive differences in local society.
Now, out of all renewable energy technologies, the one favored most by existing industry will probably be utility-scale wind power: Both for reasons already stated (they can control it), and also due to more parochial considerations - namely, that domestic automotive manufacturing can be retooled to produce wind turbines, and the Midwestern corridor has an overabundance of windy weather. PV solar, by contrast, relies almost exclusively on semiconductor manufacturing - a more rarefied and singular industry than producers of mechanical components.
It would not, therefore, be surprising if the implementation of wind power temporarily leaps ahead of solar over the next ten years, although the innovation backlog will greatly favor the latter over the long-term: The potential of solar power has not even begun to be explored, while wind turbines are primarily a convergence of otherwise well-characterized technologies. While blade and turbine design will evolve somewhat over time and be elaborated for efficiency, we have no idea where solar - in particular, PV solar - is going to lead next. In other words, wind energy is a frontier, but solar energy is dozens of frontiers, each with unknown limits and possibilities.
More conspicuous advances will be made in the fields of energy storage and electric transportation, since these are much smaller undertakings than transforming large-scale power infrastructure and - in the case of battery technology - have an existing high-volume consumer base. Densely-populated corridors will likely become familiar with battery-swap and recharging stations for EVs and plug-in hybrids, but range will be sufficiently impressive to allow for long-distance driving between electrical oases. Still, most of the cars on the road will still consume gasoline, albeit with considerably more efficient engines than today.
With the growth of EVs, we begin to notice an increasing convergence of macro-mechanical and electronic industries. This will be highly significant over the long-term, but over the next decade its main result will be a lot of interdisciplinary brainstorming and creative synergy. Here also we can expect the pace of innovation to be too rapid for manufacturers to keep up with their own research, let alone that produced in academia. Practically speaking, mobile devices will not have to be charged very often in 2020, and both the energy-density of storage media and charging speeds will have greatly increased.
Questions may arise in the next decade about the advisability of allowing vertical integration in the PV industry: I.e., would it be a good idea to allow a firm that manufacturers photovoltaic cells to also mine and transport its own raw materials, perhaps with fully electric, solar-powered equipment? If a firm could make this cost-effective, would there be antitrust concerns? If so, would the potential harm done to competition within the industry outweigh the potential benefits for the industry (and thus, humanity in general) in competition with fossil fuels? On this I am merely speculating - the question may or may not arise, but it is worth considering.
There are currently a handful of pilot projects in the United States and Persian Gulf states exploring renewably-powered water desalination, and a few of them will likely expand to utility-scale operation in the next decade and prove the concept. "Renewable-izing" humanity's water supply is likely to take much longer than its energy, and I don't expect to see revolutionary advances on this front in ten years, but there will be growing recognition that water scarcity is not inevitable.
In particular, promising experimental work is being done on wave-powered desalination systems, integrated solar-thermal/desal systems, concentrated PV/desal systems that dump excess heat into seawater for cooling and result in the water being boiled, etc. etc. There are a number of approaches being explored, and I think it likely that a few of them will lead to practical systems being implemented by 2020 on a small scale - probably in the UAE and California. This technology will be far more significant in subsequent parts of this series.
Now, you may or may not care about or be impressed by this, but I assure you it is centrally significant: Over the next decade, more human beings will travel into space than in all five preceding decades of human spaceflight combined. They will be able to do so as a result of commercial transportation services offering trips either into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or ballistic suborbital flights just beyond the atmosphere. This would occur even with flight rates far below those being promised by the most promising firms, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, so the likelihood of this happening is high. It will not change humanity - at least not by 2020 - but it will give birth to an extraordinarily potent Spore subculture whose development has no endpoint.
Something I do not expect to see in the next decade are working Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) satellites, and I would say that even operational prototypes are unlikely. The economic case for them is and will remain highly dubious in the near future, even with commercial launch services sharply reducing the price of reaching orbit. The relative cheapness, simplicity, and reliability of building a ground-based solar installation makes SBSP a costly and risky solution in search of a problem, at least within the scope of this entry in the series.
In summation, I think the most radical changes over the next decade will be things you never see - at least not during that decade: An explosive buildup of technological potential created in laboratories; incremental efficiencies accumulating behind the scenes at every point in the economy; and an incipient shift in psychology as large-scale economic decisions begin to be made on a systemic basis. It will be a decade of many beginnings.