Peace in the Middle East and renewable energy are the same: discussed at length but never seem to arrive.
The Washington Post’s Wonkblog is also guarded about whether renewable energy will ever account for much beyond the low single digit energy output for the entire energy mix in the US. However, the bloggers do note a few trends that could portend a breakout:
Across the globe, 55 terawatt-hours of solar power had been installed by the end of 2011. That may not seem like much in itself — the United States by itself, after all, needed about one hundred times that much power in 2011. But solar has been growing at a stunning rate, as panels keep getting dramatically cheaper. If these exponential growth rates, MacDonald notes, solar could provide nearly 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2018.
