Agreed! I just think it’s worth calling out that ‘trying things’ and ‘taking risky shots on goal’ looks, for solar and again for lithium ion batteries, like something on the order of ~$1-2 trillion and ~5 million person-years over the course of five decades spent developing the tech to the point that it’s finally becoming clear enough that this is practical at scale to pass the test this post uses. Maybe PV would have passed in 2015 and Li-ion/EVs in 2020? Maybe the trajectory made each seem more likely than not by at most a decade before that, a time when in practice most people still dismissed straight-line-on-graph projections as doomed to being over-optimistic? And that all of that only happened because enough people were using much less stringent tests throughout that timespan as sufficient reason to make steadily larger bets on them anyway.
Agreed! I just think it’s worth calling out that ‘trying things’ and ‘taking risky shots on goal’ looks, for solar and again for lithium ion batteries, like something on the order of ~$1-2 trillion and ~5 million person-years over the course of five decades spent developing the tech to the point that it’s finally becoming clear enough that this is practical at scale to pass the test this post uses. Maybe PV would have passed in 2015 and Li-ion/EVs in 2020? Maybe the trajectory made each seem more likely than not by at most a decade before that, a time when in practice most people still dismissed straight-line-on-graph projections as doomed to being over-optimistic? And that all of that only happened because enough people were using much less stringent tests throughout that timespan as sufficient reason to make steadily larger bets on them anyway.