It is time to award a new ATOM AotM, and the first one somewhat coincident with the newly published version 2.0 of the ATOM publication. This one has been discussed elsewhere on this website, but at the moment, it is perhaps the single biggest disruption in the global economy.
First, a small story. Photovoltaics (PV) is actually my first exponential technology, and what made be aware of the concept in a time when even 'Moore's Law' was not a household term and Intel was a very small company. When I was 10 years old, I wrote a 5th grade paper (about 800 words) on exponential improvement of solar cells of about 5% a year. It predicted cost-effectiveness in the 'early 21st century'. The paper was a hit and was submitted to a contest that all the elementary schools submitted papers to, and I was taken, along with a number of other 5th graders from the Cleveland area to an event where the Mayor of Cleveland at the time (George Voinovich) meets the children and does a photo op. We didn't understand any of that, but each child got a framed certificate.
Sure enough, as the decades passed, PV did become cost effective in the early 21st century. It has been a subject on this website for a long time, and while we often point out how many technologies have failed to meet industry-derived projections, as you can see from this old 2007 article, a US DoE chart thought PV installations in the US would be merely 15 to 30 GWs. In reality, the 2020 number is about thrice the upper bound of that projection, at 80-90 GWs, with over 3% of US electricity generated through PV. Even better, the world average is higher than the US average, and the world total continues to grow in excess of 25% a year. Remember that this ATOM advancement is tied to the advancement of electric vehicles, as not merely is crude oil being replaced with electricity. For many countries, the oil was imported, while the photovoltaic electricity is generated domestically. This is a victory against OPEC, as imports from OPEC are being replaced with domestic energy.
As we recall Swanson's Law, the 40-year trend is consistent (note that both axes are logarithmic). While it took decades to get up to 3% of world electricity consumption being through PV, the jump from 3% to 12%+ will not take longer than a few years. The inflection point is here, and the dollar impact is among the biggest of any ATOM transformations currently underway. Even more than the dollar impact, it is the multiplier effect of these specific dollars given where the shift is being generated.
(Images from Wikipedia and Our World in Data. Click to enlarge).
The best part about solar, which is not true of wind power, is that the poorest countries in the world are in fact the ones with the greatest solar intensity, and are thus the most suitable for solar. Much has been written about why cold-weather cultures have done better than hot-weather cultures on average, but now the very resource that was not being monetized can be monetized. By contrast, wind power, while good, is both slower-advancing and most applicable in countries that are already wealthy, and so does not have quite the same multiplier effect. This map of solar intensity indicates where the greatest utility of photovoltaics can reside (image attribution, GNU Free Documentation License v1.2).
The absolute lowest-prosperity countries are still too disorganized to take advantage of this, but even the third quartile is well-prepared to rapidly increase PV installations and move away from oil imports. In the near future, it will seem quite absurd that people were importing their energy from thousands of miles away.
Related :
The End of Petrotyranny - Victory
The End of Petrotyranny
Solar Power's Next Five Game-Changing Technologies
A Future Timeline for Energy
Why I Want Oil to Hit $120 per Barrel (epic 2007 article)
Related ATOM Chapters :
3. Technological Disruption is Pervasive and Deepening
