Comment on World now has five times more PV than nuclear power

• dgmib@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s not an exponential curve. It’s slower than that.

  It’s more than linear; we are adding more capacity each year than the year before. But added capacity per year as a percentage of the previous years total is a decreasing.

  If it was exponential the growth would be a straight(ish) line when plotted on a logarithmic scale… it’s not. On a log scale the line inflects.

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  • frezik@midwest.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    It’s exponential.

    livemint.com/…/the-exponential-growth-of-solar-po…

    To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

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    • dgmib@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Whoever wrote that article is playing fast and loose with the definition of exponential.

      Here’s the actual data of global electricity source on a log scale for the past ~15 years

      Notice that the line for both wind and solar is inflecting to the right. If it was exponential it would be straight.

      The time between each doubling of output is increasing.

      It’s close, but not enough to be exponential growth.

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