Graphene-Based Supercapacitors Could Lead To Battery-Free Electric Cars Within 5 Years

[True Blue Door]

7. Storage technology is making leaps and bounds, but...

It's crystallizing into so many different technological frontiers that it's unlikely we're going to see the economic fruits any time soon. More like the soil is being sown for radical, utopian progress over 30 to 40 years.

But solar technology is already on a Moore's Law curve, so even while storage lags it will annihilate the fossil fuel industry. Just completely annihilate it. Because solar is a technology, not a fuel source, so it will never stop getting cheaper as a long-term trend. Ever. It will meet the fossil fuels on a $/kWh basis, then transcend them, then become so radically cheap that the industrial base underpinning the fossil fuel industry can no longer be supported. That will happen in this generation.

I've seen studies claiming that it will only be 1/3 of the market by 2040, but they always have to freeze technology at current levels - an insupportable premise. A study looking at cellphones in the 1980s would be able to make equally "valid" claims about the future market by freezing them at 1980s prices, sizes, and performance.