9,223,372,036,854,775,808

According to a recent Future Blogger post by a solar industry buddy of mine, Erik Brolis, “locations such as Hawaii are already at ‘grid-parity,’ where the cost of purchasing electricity from the utility equals that of producing one’s own from an unsubsidized solar PV system. Most PV manufacturers anticipate grid-parity within 5 years in most places around the world. Even George W. Bush proclaimed the goal of grid-parity by 2015!”

That’s the now and the near-future. Subsequently, advanced biological modeling + robust evolutionary computing + AI-ish thing + advances in all other fields will push the exponential solar trend.

The link to Eriks post is:
http://memebox.com/futureblogger/show/103

Batteries have their own mini-chessboard, so do ultra-capacitors.

It’s hard to know yet which form of storage will dominate.

By the way, I don’t think that we’ll be 100% solar in 20 years. I doubt that even Kurzweil thinks that.

I do believe that solar could quickly become the dominant power source given sufficiently cheap cells and storage capability.

Intermittent power sources are not going to be of much use without efficient low cost storage.

Which currently has no road map. Unlike solar and wind.

WB-7 First Plasma

http://www.squidoo.com/nerdanomics

Search for: “SunPower Talk – US To Be Majority Solar in 19 Years? “, as well as “Windmills US Majority Power in About 18 Years?”

Similarly “Hybrid Autos at 50% Market Share in 10 Years?” predicts a hybrid takeover of the US auto market in 2017. That’s interesting to me, because if it happens, a follow on takeover of plug-in hybrids, which would vastly reduce liquid gas consumption, would be by 2027.

We’ll probably stop importing gas before we pull out of Iraq under most current plans. Not that there’s any relationship.