The folks at Ember shared three exponential curves – new solar additions, Electric vehicles as a share of car sales, and US coal demand.
The fascinating part of the chart isn’t just the s-curve trend and the direction of the arrow, it is the grey lines that show the forecasts.
I’ve been writing about these technologies for years, and I’ve shared many of the prevailing forecasts along the way. In every one of these cases, reality has outpaced even the most optimistic predictions.
Solar and electric vehicles continue to scale faster than projected while coal demand continues to fall quickly.
It’s a reminder of a simple fact – our instincts map to linear curves.
This just means we are terrible at intuitively understanding and forecasting exponential curves.
