The Future And You--February 19, 2014

Topic: Ten predictions for 2014, by Michael Liebreich (Chairman of the Advisory Board, Bloomberg New Energy Finance) covering renewable energy, carbon, digital energy technology and storage, natural gas, conventional power and advanced transportation.

His tenth prediction may be his most important: "For over a hundred years the orthodox view of the energy system prevailed. Power generation was big, dirty and central. Grids were centralized and dumb. Reliability was provided by holding over-capacity. Vehicle fuels were oil-based. For some years now we have been saying that this orthodoxy is not going to hold in the future. I predict 2014 is going to be the year when this becomes starkly obvious to most people. Until now, it has been up to the proponents of a new system to argue that change is on its way. In 2014 the tables will turn. Change will be the default assumption, and it will be up to the proponents of orthodoxy to argue why they disagree.
 The orthodoxy that clean energy is an expensive luxury cannot be maintained when wind power can be sold for 5 cents/kWh and solar for 10 cents/kWh, before subsidies, in more and more parts of the world."

Michael Liebreich also provides predictions concerning: electric vehicles, the smart grid, natural gas prices, solar manufacturers, traditional electric utilities, wind power installations on land and on sea, clean energy investments including green bonds, and the US Production Tax Credit.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 19, 2014 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 41 minutes] This episode contains selections from and commentary on Michael Liebreich's article: A Year of Cracking Ice: 10 Predictions for 2014.

Stephen Euin Cobb is an author, futurist, magazine writer and host of the award-winning podcast The Future And You. A contributing editor for Space and Time Magazine; he has also been a regular contributor for Robot, H+, Grim Couture and Port Iris magazines; and he spent three years as a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine. He is an artist, essayist, game designer, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation. Stephen is the author of Indistinguishable from Magic: Predictions of Revolutionary Future Science as well as A Brief History of Predicting the Future.