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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.
C'mon SlashDot, we've seen this. A) Important advances make an old monopoly face a future of obsolescence. B) Monopolists lean on the government to use messaging or force to make everyone play ball the old way. C) It doesn't work in the end, making a waste of all the wrangling. Make no mistake: renewables are starting to undercut fossil fuels. If the USA didn't have a 220% or more tarriff on Chinese solar panels to protect its manufacturers, this would be even further along. The oil industry is pulling a lot of levers to get more money out of its old markets before they're obsolete is all. It doesn't change the fact that they're seeing their version of Napster.