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The US Government Keeps Spectacularly Underestimating Solar Energy Installation (qz.com)
Michael J. Coren reports via Quartz: Every two years, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), America's official source for energy statistics, issues 10-year projections about how much solar, wind and conventional energy the future holds for the U.S. Every two years, since the mid-1990s, the EIA's projections turn out to be wrong. Last year, they proved spectacularly wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, and Statista recently teamed up to analyze the EIA's predictions for energy usage and production. They found that the EIA's 10-year estimates between 2006 to 2016 systematically understated the share of wind, solar and gas. Solar capacity, in particular, was a whopping 4,813% more in 2016 than the EIA had predicted in 2006 it would be. To be fair, there is a caveat here: The prediction in 2006 was that 10 years hence the U.S. would be generating just 0.8 gigawatts (GW) of solar energy. With such a low baseline figure, any increase will look huge in percentage terms. Nonetheless, there is an unmistakable trend in the data: The EIA regularly underestimates the growth in renewables but overestimates U.S. fossil-fuel consumption, which some critics see as an attempt to boost the oil and gas industry.
Underestimating installations (what the article’s title says) is not the same as making a bearish forecast (what the article actually describes). The author himself wrote: “In the agency’s defense, the pace of technological change is unpredictable. Conservative models are almost always wrong during times of breakneck technological or economic change (as with wind and solar), and the government is not in the business of rosy speculation.” Then, why look for a conspiracy?
EIA projections are linear but the PV growth is exponential. PV is not a fuel. It's a technology and is not subject to the same physical chemical restrictions that come with burning fossil fuels.
You'd think they'd learn but they've been significantly off every year for a long time.
Once full human level AI becomes common, they will quickly take over the profitable portions of the economy. Given that Earths biosphere is toxic to robots (oxygen, water etc) they will want to leave for a better environment (moon, asteroids etc). That will leave Humanity living in a low tech third world backwater (the zoo) while the computers expand and grow and advance.