According to Science Daily, the Costs of Solar and Wind Continue to Plummet, and Renewable Energy Is Rapidly Replacing Fossil Fuels

Peter Buck writes:  I found this article interesting–along the lines you propose in “Bullish” (on Renewable Energy) i.e., that solar and wind power will be the cheapest forms of energy in the future.

Thanks very much, Peter.  Yes, this really is happening, and for the exact reasons I lay out in the book; it’s gratifying to see them printed in such an august publication.

Coincidentally, I just finished watching a five-hour series of lectures on thermodynamics, the last 10 minutes of which is an explanation of Boltzmann’s equation (above) that says (in English) that the amount of disorder in a system is related to the number of different arrangements that the system can take.  For instance, if you put 100 coins in a box and shake the box, there is a chance they will all come up heads, but it’s 2^-100, which is an extremely small number.  If I think of all the molecules of gas in my office here, there is a chance that they will all move into my empty coffee cup and leave the rest of the office a vacuum, but that probability is so small that it’s practically impossible.

Why on Earth would I tell you this story?  It’s because I believe that it applies to the coming ubiquity of renewable energy, in that there are so many ways to make this happen.  The probability of our getting increasingly good at developing ways to capture energy from the sun (or from the Earth’s interior, or from annihilating little bits of mass) is growing, because there are so many ways to make it happen, given that the energy is so abundant, there are so many smart people working on it, they’re developing a huge variety of materials, etc.

Btw, the equation was the culmination of Boltzmann’s life’s work, and was so important to him that the above is actually a photograph of a part of his tombstone; according to the (incredible) professor at Yale University who gave the lectures, “When physicists go to Vienna they skip the orchestras and visit that cemetery so they can develop a renewed enthusiasm for this concept.”