Most people, and most politicians, don’t realize it yet. But by the 2030s solar will be the largest source of electricity in the world. By the 2040s it will be the largest source of energy in the world. It’s going to change the world in ways we don’t yet understand. And nothing can stop this change. The price of solar and batteries will be lower than every other alternative.
Big fan of Hannah Ritchie's analyses, but I do feel like that PDF is a little over optimistic with both future and allegedly recent peaks for fossil fuel consumption. That said, I retrieved a bunch of a bunch of historical data from OWID, and with some cheap regression analysis in Desmos, I compiled this mindmelting graph
Basically the energy singularity happens in 2034, where wind daily generation + solar daily consumption — which is disturbingly superlinear — eclipses the global energy consumption trend — which is disturbingly linear — and then worldwide storage, which is growing at an even more absurd pace, exceeds solar and wind the following year. And then 4 years after that we have 10 days of worldwide storage. All the while appliances are becoming more efficient. Perhaps AI, VR, and transport electification will soak up the excess, but we've yet to see even crypto make a noticeable bump in global energy consumption above trend, just glancing at the data.
Edit: I couldn't get good data on energy storage, so I used 'added capacity' from here and also a quote from the same site that implies there was 173Gwh capacity in 2021:
> Global installed storage capacity is forecast to expand by 56% in the next five years to reach over 270 GW by 2026.
