For those hours when the sun is not shining, battery storage steps in, including power from electric vehicles which can be used as a power source. The use of large-scale power plants would be limited to providing extra electricity for cities, and for aluminium smelters, data centres and other plants.
Mr Seba's theory is based on the assumption that energy storage costs – for lithium-ion batteries for example – continues to drop at about 16 per cent a year, driving a replacement of power plants on the grid by energy storage and plunging prices for electric vehicles.
He expects that by 2025, every new vehicle will be electric, with the remaining conventional car fleet to be rapidly wiped out as the self-driving car revolution disrupts transport and pushes the world towards car sharing and mobility-on-demand transport.