{"id":710,"date":"2011-02-04T12:07:29","date_gmt":"2011-02-04T17:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www3.law.harvard.edu\/journals\/hlpr\/?p=710"},"modified":"2015-10-02T15:58:31","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:58:31","slug":"moores-law-and-the-future-of-renewable-energy-or-why-we-cant-get-to-80-percent-clean-energy-in-2035-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/2011\/02\/04\/moores-law-and-the-future-of-renewable-energy-or-why-we-cant-get-to-80-percent-clean-energy-in-2035-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Moore\u2019s Law and The Future of Renewable Energy, or Why We Can\u2019t Get to 80 Percent Clean Energy in 2035: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Harrow<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the first post in a multi-part series. New posts will appear every Friday. Feedback is welcome to\u00a0<\/em>jason.harrow@gmail.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Moore\u2019s Law describes how quickly computer technology evolves, and I do not know how many lawyers, policymakers, and law students are familiar with it. I would guess that most are not. This is probably because the rate of change of computer chips seems obscure, irrelevant to law and policy, and, anyway, a little bit made-up. How can it possibly be that the speed with which people can improve computer technology \u2014 that is, how much faster your laptop is now than it was five years ago \u2014 can obey anything like a \u201claw?\u201d And even if it does, how can that possibly affect how we think about energy policy?<\/p>\n

This series of posts is an attempt to answer both of those questions. This first post is an introduction to Moore\u2019s Law and other related laws of technological change. My description will be at a high-level of generality. That\u2019s because I\u2019m not interested in the details of integrated circuits, and, even if I were, the details don\u2019t matter. What matters will be this: it turns out that some technologies change really, really quickly; have behaved like this for a half-century or for more; and don\u2019t appear to be slowing down. In fact, this set of technologies improves faster than any other technologies ever have in the history of humanity. Sadly, though, not all technologies change so quickly \u2014 and green technologies are among this slower set. In subsequent posts in this series, I will explore why policymakers need to realize this when they think about energy policy, and why President Obama does not appear to have sufficiently grappled with this reality in setting his new \u201cclean energy\u201d goal.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/span>1. What is Moore\u2019s Law?<\/span><\/p>\n

Moore\u2019s Law is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, the world\u2019s largest computer chip manufacturer. The\u00a0Law<\/a>\u00a0states that \u201cthe number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months.\u201d I recognize that this may be meaningless to some readers, but the key implication is that \u201ccomputing chips shrink by half in size and cost<\/a>\u201d roughly every two years. Because we\u2019ve now been living in the \u201cInformation Age\u201d for a few decades, we\u2019re getting used to upgrading to amazing new devices every two years, but if you take a step back, this doubling-ever-two-years is simply astounding.<\/p>\n

Other aspects of the information technology world exhibit similarly accelerating growth, and some trends even have their own names. Kryder\u2019s Law, for instance, says that hard drive capacity works roughly the same as computer chips, so that every few years hard drives will get substantially better and cheaper. According to\u00a0this post<\/a>\u00a0by technologist Kevin Kelly \u2014 whose recent book\u00a0What Technology Wants<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>inspired this series \u2014 and a\u00a0nice Wikipedia page<\/a>\u00a0on Moore\u2019s Law, things work the same way when it comes to the pixels in your digital camera or the ability to transmit information over a fiber optic network. These things don\u2019t just get better. They get a\u00a0lot<\/em>\u00a0better, really quickly. Counterintuitively, when they do, they also get cheaper. This is what has been driving the miraculous Information Age that we are currently living through.<\/p>\n

To understand how dramatic the change has been in this cluster of technologies, consider a few illustrative examples. In 2000, one gigabyte of hard drive space cost $44.56. In 2010, it cost $.07. In 2000, it cost $193 per gigabyte to stream video. In 2010, it cost $.03. (Both of those comparisons are from\u00a0this<\/a>\u00a0Wired<\/em>infographic.) In 2000, Apple\u2019s best laptop had a 400 MHz chip, 64 MB of RAM, and a 6 GB harddrive. It cost over $3,100 in today\u2019s dollars. Today\u2019s high-end Apple laptop has a 2.53 GHz processer, 4 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB harddrive. It is exponentially better than the version of a decade ago, yet it costs $1,000 less \u2014 $2,199. Today, the miniscule and inexpensive iPhone is easily more powerful than the fastest laptops of 2000. Because things change so quickly, so many technologies that are now critical to our lives, from Facebook to tablet computers to YouTube, did not even exist a decade ago.<\/p>\n

Change has proceeded at this pace in these industries for the last half-century or so, and it shows no signs of slowing. There are rumblings that we may be reaching some theoretical physical limitations \u2014 just how tiny can you make a computer chip, after all? \u2014 but engineers have blown through all predicted limitations so far. There is no particular reason to think they will stop now, and even if they do slow down a little, and improvements double only every three years, change still accelerates exponentially.<\/p>\n

This is exciting on its own, but it\u2019s also important for subsequent posts to realize how seductive this kind of growth is. It is tempting to think that everything \u201chigh-tech\u201d gets better and cheaper on a two-year scale. But, sadly, not everything follows this curve \u2014 in fact, Moore\u2019s Law is rare and amazing, and not at all the norm. For instance, I suppose that cleaning supplies have gotten better over my lifetime, but I cannot clean my kitchen twice as quickly as I could two years ago due to amazing new cleaning products. The same is true of screws, tube socks, ceiling fans, and legal argumentation; none of those is twice as good as it was in 2009. Airplanes are not twice as fast as they were two years ago, polar fleece is not twice as warm, and frozen dinners are not twice as delicious.<\/p>\n

In my next post, I\u2019ll show that one other sector that doesn\u2019t obey Moore\u2019s Law is energy technology, like battery capacity and solar panel efficiency. Sadly, and perhaps disastrously, these technologies are not among the special few that show this \u201coff-the-charts\u201d growth.<\/p>\n

With that as groundwork, my goal in the next coming posts will be to show that policymakers need to understand that, although they cannot predict the future, they can estimate with some accuracy how quickly technologies will improve. When we look carefully at the curve for renewable energy technologies, it is clear that it will be nearly impossible to get to the President\u2019s goal of producing 80 percent \u201cclean\u201d energy by 2035 without some seriously fuzzy accounting (and, as I\u2019ll show, this fuzzy accounting has already begun). It\u2019s a sad but true reality that the technology curve is just not steep enough, and no amount of wishing or invoking \u201cAmerican innovation\u201d will make it so. At the end, I\u2019ll try to outline what an energy strategy that does not rely on wishful thinking about technology\u2019s ability to easily solve the problem of climate change might look like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Harrow This is the first post in a multi-part series. New posts will appear every Friday. Feedback is welcome […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZQka-bs","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}