Earlier this month, Moore’s law -- the prediction that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years -- turned 50 years old.
It so happens that the silicon solar panel, the dominant variety in the market today, is about the same age -- roughly 52 years old. And over the last half-century, while the computing power of an identically sized microchip increased by a factor of over a billion, the power output of an identically sized silicon solar panel more or less doubled.
The contrast between Moore’s law for microchips and the plodding progress of clean technology is bittersweet for me. Growing up, I would wait impatiently for my father to bring home a new computer, powered by a faster, next-generation processor -- his office was across from Gordon Moore’s at Intel. When he founded a solar panel startup, he brought the limitless optimism of Moore’s law with him, but like myriad other cleantech startups, his company struggled to stay afloat given the surging tide of cheap, mediocre silicon solar panels from China.
My own doctoral research focused on exciting alternatives to silicon solar panels, but those alternatives face a daunting barrier to entry from large silicon firms. So while I celebrate the startling prescience with which Gordon Moore, in 1965, predicted the density of transistors 50 years hence and every year in between, I reject the notion that clean technologies like solar panels and batteries follow a Moore-esque decline in cost.
Unfortunately, a chorus of voices in the mainstream media have echoed the claim that Moore’s law is guiding the regular decline in clean technology costs as production increases, enabling a massive energy transition from fossil fuels. In an excellent 2011 piece, Michael Kanellos at Forbes gently corrected this claim, but he was still too charitable in conceding that clean energy advocates were “wrong in the particulars, but right in their outlook.”
Rather, that outlook is far too complacent, satisfied with pedestrian cost declines and stagnating performance in lieu of disruptive technology advances, more in line with Moore’s law. To date, there have been three crucial differences between Moore’s law for microchips and the historical cost declines of solar panels and batteries:
Moore’s law is a consequence of fundamental physics. Clean technology cost declines are not.
Moore’s law is a prediction about innovation as a function of time. Clean technology cost declines are a function of experience, or production.
Moore’s law provided a basis to expect dramatic performance improvements that shrank mainframes to mobile phones. Clean technology cost declines do not imply a similar revolution in energy.
Difference #1: Moore’s law is a consequence of fundamental physics. Clean technology cost declines are not.
When Gordon Moore made his prediction in 1965 (original article in Electronics here) that the most economical number of transistors on a computer chip would double every two years, he based his reasoning on the physics of transistors. In hindsight, Moore’s physical instinct was confirmed: “As the dimensions of a transistor shrank, the transistor became smaller, lighter, faster, consumed less power, and in most cases was more reliable. [...] It has often been a life without tradeoffs.”
In other words, Moore’s primary insight was that shrinking the transistor made it work better -- as a happy corollary to this shrinkage, the cost per unit of computing power kept falling, because the cost of manufacturing the same chip area has remained roughly constant.
Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons
On the contrary, clean technology cost declines have very little to do with the physics of the actual devices being built. For example, falling costs of silicon solar panels have largely been driven by lower input material costs from scale, lower labor costs through manufacturing automation, and lower waste driven by efficient processing. All of these cost reductions follow na...
