Lots of big jumps in the article and the devil is in the details. Solar panels have seen a lot of innovation in the last few decades. Simply pumping out tons of 30 year old technology may have stunted that progress or even created so much waste that solar could have been deemed as non-viable. Some panel technologies are really hard to recycle but have held a performance edge at different times in solar tech development. Sometimes going all-in on mass production of something is not worth the short-term savings.

   The elephant in the room to answer the 'why' is that fossil fuels were already working and it took vision to see beyond them and the massive subsidies they get. When vision was available (Jimmy Carter and solar panels on the White House comes to mind) the people without vision, or people that understood how to make a buck today at the expense of tomorrow, put up roadblocks (Regan tearing them down...). The technology, because it is massively better, eventually caught up and passed fossil fuels (yes I am talking in the past tense) which has finally made it easy to see even without vision and finally made it able for people to make a buck today. Nothing has structurally changed that would have allowed us to make different choices in the 70s. We are only, finally, now seeing the solar wave because the same forces are at play now as then. This means we haven't learned anything and will do (are doing?) this again with other technologies and issues.

The real question we should be asking ourselves is how to prevent this disastrous pattern from happening again and again. There is no point moaning that solar took so long to happen and there isn't a point to blaming 'big oil' since they will soon be replaced with ? (Big Tech? Big Solar? Big Ag? Big Space?). What are -actual- concrete changes can be made to avoid this type of mess in the future?

Article misses the fact that a lot of governments in the 70s and 80s (shoutout to Germany especially) put a lot of investment into solar panel adoption, which is part of why the cost dropped so much in the 80s and 90s and 2000s.

If the point is generalizable, we should build more nuclear power plants. They will become cheaper.

Last I checked, Moore's Law simply does not apply to photovoltaics.

The exponential increase in computing comes from being able to make smaller transistors, and the fact that a smaller transistor is able to perform the same computation as a bigger transistor.

A smaller solar cell is not capable of converting the same amount of power as a larger cell, because its power output depends on the area. (Also on the efficiency, but that's a separate issue, and not subject to exponentials).

It was also always something that was driven by demand, as you need ever more expensive fabs to create the smaller feature sizes. It is most definitely not something that happened just due to time passing.

In Spain in 2007, the Government asked people to invest in solar panels guaranteeing a price that was outrageously high for a long time. Of course then it changed the price and 60.000 families were bankrrupted.

Solar panel were ultra expensive and could not compete with other types of energy.

Of course lots of the people in Government became rich as a result of the operation.

Today we are having problems with solar panels network instability. Yesterday there was a 3 hour blackout in big parts of Spain because solar unbalance.

So it is not that easy.

The author makes some big leaps, both in logic and execution, including the fact that you need some level of concensus to go "all in" on anything new - or to be an autocratic dictator who "knows best".

I wonder how much of the momentum is due to panel manufacturing, and how much is due to advances in inverter and battery tech.

Think about what we could do with nuclear power if we had spent decades designing and building cheaper reactors. Small Modular Reactors out of a factory could solve the biggest problem of nuclear, that it's expensive and takes a long time to build.

Smart people's disease: "I read about Wright's Law, which says the more $X you make the cheaper it gets. Therefore for all manufactured products $X, the more we make, the cheaper they'll get."

STEM helped me a ton in college, when I move from physics to economics, everything was "just a curve" instead of something that needed to be approached and memorized individually

Here, instead of feeling put out that ex. government won't just throw more money at carbon capture, I can say "well, we're just describing a power curve, which is not a law"

For electricity generation alone (which is also what TFA talks about) we could even have done it 30 years ago. In fact France did, so this is not pure speculation, it's just a terrible missed opportunity.

An aside: Tim Harford presents one of the very best programmes on BBC Radio 4: More or Less [1].

Each programme investigates the reality behind statistics used in the media and by politicians. It's quite UK-centric, of course, but simply one of the most informative shows there is.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd

Imho the real problem that will be harder to reverse on is the city planning. Car-oriented cities will be intrinsically far more difficult to green than urban density.

Late 20th and early 21st century city planners will be remembered as an entire profession of Thomas Midgley Juniors.

This is obviously true but so could many of humanity's worst practices and behaviors. The problem is no one wants to make the various sacrifices that come with changing status quo. Debating what could have been done is silly. The only interesting question really is whether this inherent reticence will cause a civilizational collapse, human extinction, planetary obsolescence or perhaps only something of a temporary dark ages for humans and life on earth.

> Gordon Moore’s famous prediction about computing power must count as one of the most astonishingly accurate forecasts in history

IMHO, because it's been used as a road map, not due anything else. Like a drop-by-drop commercial service.

On free will, by how the techniques advance, the computer power would experience abruptly high computing increases, with undetermined development periods occurring in between.

We're not able to left it in the dust today, how could we have done so 25 years ago?

"we" should have, but "we" could not.

And the one big thing that prevented this from happening was that fossil fuel companies gas lit is for years pretending that climate change wasn’t real.

You give someone X. Then later you say, you don't need X any more because you can have Y. They say, thanks, now I have X and Y.

The market has not agreed, and one favors that over the various vocal minorities whose claims have simply not borne out.

Saying that some law or principle works in one context, so it can probably work here or that some country did X so we can do it too doesn't really account for many of the nuances.

Solar panels aren't equally effective everywhere on Earth and some countries or parts of countries are just in different places on Earth. They're also not equally effective in all kinds of weather and some places just have worse weather.

You would need a huge oversupply to be able to reliably redirect energy to areas that are underproducing through long distance high voltage transfer lines, which are not perfectly efficient and lose energy along the way.

What if night time comes, as it tends to? What if a huge weather event blankets a lot of the country for a day or a few days? What if a volcano erupts somewhere and darkens the sky for a while?

Batteries, you say! Batteries have their limits too, and they were even worse 25 years ago.

Solar panels and batteries weren't simply about reducing costs and increasing supply, they were also about performance, how much land you need, where the land would be, managing adverse events, handling dips, efficiencies, creating jobs, projected innovations (where are we relative to where we can be), etc.

In another context, if you send food to poor countries that can't produce as much of their own food and the population starts increasing far beyond the resources of the land, you have a country that's even more dependent than it was before and risk terrible famine if a supply chain breaks down.

If the government had artificially pushed for the production of massive amounts of solar panels and batteries, it could make too many people dependent on something less reliable. When the government funding dries up for it, much of the demand and jobs can dry up too if the demand isn't naturally coming from the market.

You could also make the argument that if we had pushed so hard for crappy solar panels back then, it could have failed and soured interest in it even a few decades later. This could apply in the political sphere or even among the population who have memories of being stuck with crappy panels and all the problems they experienced. So if you really believe in and want solar panels to succeed, being too extreme about it too early can potentially be worse rather than better regardless of these cost principles.

The question has to be asked if something is truly effective altruism when assessed across the full cycle and span of the problem. I don't even know the full cycle or span of the problem, these are just outside observations. It's probably even more complicated than this.

Nuclear could have done it, but then the Soviets and Greenpeace came along and ruined it.

Just another spin on communism and central planning. Why don’t we let the market decide? Why don’t we let people decide what is best for them instead of forcing one technology or another? Inflation is ultra high yet we are ignoring the root cause: increasing cost of inputs due to new taxes and tariffs, and instead hoping that by also increasing the cost of capital all will be good again.

much of recent production cost reductions are due to Chinese manufacturing which trade significant environmental damage for increased productivity.

   governments should have been falling over themselves to buy or otherwise subsidise expensive solar PV, because the more we bought, the faster the price would fall

That's quite a stretch, especially considering that there are plenty of examples where government subsidies and intervention distorts markets and makes them less efficient and more dysfunctional. I don't disagree with the general premise of the article: more could have been done to transition to renewable energy sooner. But it's really simplistic to say there was a clear, easy answer to this, and it simply involved more government spending on solar energy.