The next ten years are likely to bring dramatic and surprising changes to the US energy sector, and solar could become a much larger part of the mix, said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz at the Energy Information Administration 2013 conference in Washington, DC on Monday.
Moniz’s speech focused in large part on the intersection of energy and national security, highlighting the potential implications of oil dependence, climate change, nuclear power and infrastructure integrity. But he also stressed that there is no clear picture of how these issues may evolve, with projections based in large part on current conditions.
In the same way the last ten years have altered the US energy system in surprising ways, the next ten years may result in similar upheaval, which may include a larger role for solar than expected, Moniz said.
“The scale and timeframe of the impact of solar technology is underestimated,” said Moniz. “There are many situations today in which solar is in fact competitive.”
He stressed that rapid, unanticipated technological developments, such as advancements in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, upended the US natural gas outlook and resulted in surprisingly large oil production growth in less than a decade. Coincident with this oil and gas turnaround were a doubling of renewables over four years – set to double again by 2020 – and dramatic emissions reductions from coal-to-gas switching in the power sector, he said.
“We need to keep that in mind when we think of the future as a simple extrapolation from the present,” Moniz said. “We will see far more change than we tend to anticipate, much of it technology-driven, but hopefully with synergistic policies, as well,” Moniz said.
He highlighted solar’s “incredibly reduced costs” over the past ten years, from $10 per watt to the region of $1 per watt, and indicated that future solar success may surprise to the upside. “That’s an example of something we will look back on in ten years and be surprised at the scope of the change,” he said.
But while solar can help to diversify US energy sources and cut emissions, and the technology has the potential to advance, improvements are still needed on both efficiency and costs. “There’s more to do,” he said.
