What Will We Do With Our Free Power?

The shocking rise of solar is reshaping the energy landscape 

“I simply cannot believe where we are with solar,” says Jenny Chase, the BloombergNEF analyst and quite possibly the person in the world who knows the most about the business of turning the light of the sun into electricity. “And if you’d told me nearly 20 years ago what would be the case now, 20 years later,” she continues, “I would have just said you were crazy. I would have laughed in your face. There is genuinely a revolution happening.” By just 2030, Chase estimates, solar power will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year “pretty much everywhere.”

David Wallace-Wells in NY Times 

The expert on turning solar into electricity thought free solar was crazy 20 years ago and I could swear people were still complaining only 10-15 years ago that solar would never be cheap enough to compete with natural gas or whatever fossil fuel. So what I want to know is how the experts got this so wrong? Not so much so as to have someone to blame but maybe their skepticism reflects some old ways of thinking, free market ideology, innovation must come only from private investment based on market demand, stuff like that, that we ought to be rethinking sooner rather than later? Maybe with some common sense "Industrial Policy" 20 years ago we might already have free solar power? As for 'What Will We Do With Our Free Power?' Well, if we leave its production and distribution entirely up to private industry I'm going way out on a limb and guessing we won't likely be giving it away free to anybody any time soon.