Disruptive
The technologies facilitating these trends benefit from the same
phenomena that support Kurzweil’s and Vinge’s predictions of the
human / machine singularity. Moore’s Law has prevailed. The
performance of integrated circuits (and other electronic devices)
doubles every year or two while the cost remains the same.
Conversely, every year or two comparable computational power can
be had for half the cost. The result has been a revolution in
electronics, information and telecommunications technologies and
accompanying disruption and restructuring of the related industries,
including the telecommunications utility industry as well as many
other bricks and mortar retail businesses.
Moore’s law is really just a special case of a more profound
principle that applies to any technology, including energy
technologies. Theodore Wright articulated this concept in 1936. His
observation became known as Wright’s Law or the Rule of
Experience. [3] Ray Kurzweil more recently expanded and restated
Wright’s Law as the Law of Accelerating Returns. [4] Essentially,
practice makes perfect and there are economies of production. The
power and economics of new technologies in general, not just
integrated circuits, improves exponentially both because we learn by
doing how to make them better and the cost of any particular
component declines as greater numbers are produced. In an ironic
development, economies of scale in the electric utility industry have
moved from fewer and bigger centralized power plants and
transmission corridors to the mass manufacturing of distributed
energy production, storage and management devices.
Factor in the exploding growth in global demand for electric power
and energy. The developing economies, unencumbered by a legacy
grid leapfrog directly to the distributed model, just as the moved
directly to wireless telecommunications, skipping the landline
systems in place in the developed economies. The rest of the world
will use orders of magnitude more power and energy than is being
used today which means that the acceleration increases by orders of
magnitude! Just as this revolutionized the telecommunications
industry, so it will revolutionize the electric utility industry.