Inventing Green: The Lost History of Alternative Energy in America

The Forecast Project: How wrong have we been about energy and technology?

Perhaps the most famous forecast in energy history is that atomic power would be “too cheap to meter.”

On September 16, 1954, Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, told a group of science writers, “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter,” thanks to The Friendly Atom.

Was he serious? Some people say no, that he just got a little carried away. Others — notably Steve Cohn in his book Too Cheap to Meter — have shown that the idea that nuclear power would become incredibly cheap permeated the nuclear industry. Maybe not today, the dour realists assured us, but some day soon. That day has never come to pass.

The problem, as Vaclav Smil points out in Energy at the Crossroads, is not limited to the nuclear industry. Pretty much everybody has been terrible at forecasting technological progress, energy demand, and the cost of energy.

“[F]or more than 100 years long-term energy forecasts of energy affairs — no matter if they were concerned with specific inventions and subsequent commercial diffusion of new conversion techniques or if they tried to chart broad sectoral, national, or global consumption trends — have, save for a few proverbial exceptions confirming the rule, a manifest record of failure,” Smil thunders.

Having seen a few thousand forecasts, I’d tend to agree with the man. But I want to try an experiment out on Inventing Green. I’m going to look through my books and documents and post every historical forecast that I can.

I welcome your additions from across the energy spectrum, no matter whether a given estimate missed high or low. Specifically, I’m looking for individually testable statements of what the future is going to be like. Like, say, $0.40 per peak watt solar power by the year 2000.

1. whisperoftheshot liked this
2. brightsideblog posted this