Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Is our future all sunny?
Last week, I mentioned that we're hosting a workshop: Reinventing Our Energy Futures. Yesterday, we kicked things off with a keynote speech by Tony Seba, author of Solar Trillions. Tony has an entrepreneurial/tech background and has been lecturing at Stanford where he teaches clean energy, high tech strategy and finance. He led his presentation with a very dramatic data point: over the next 40 years, the energy industry is poised to make $382 trillion in revenue...more than 25x the size of America's GDP in 2011! By 2050, his math suggests that we'll need to replace 14TW of existing energy generating plants and introduce and additional 16TW of new energy generating plants. This energy will come from existing sources (oil, gas, hydro and wind)...but none of those will be able to scale to meet our future energy needs
Tony suggests that solar is the only clean technology that will be able to scale to meet that gap. His opportunities are listed below...and since we love to back up forecasts (even other people's forecasts), I've dug up some signals for each:
- Utility-Scale Solar (Concentrated Solar Power in the Sahara)
- Industrial-Scale Solar (Cutting Data Center Energy)
- Island/Village-Scale Solar (Hawaii Riding High on Solar Power)
- Home Commercial-Scale Solar (Million Solar Roofs)
- Solar Clean Water (Solar Desalination)
- Energy Storage (Liquid Metal Batteries)
- Smart Grid (US Smart Grid)
We'd love to see the signals you find while we reinvent our energy future...feel free to use the #AltEnergy tag as well and follow our workshop on Twitter.