Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030

This book provides convincing arguments about how the meteoric increase in technology will displace traditional energy and transportation systems and therefore change the very foundations of our societies. Tony Seba points out that the rise in affordable solar power and self-driving vehicles will leave traditional fossil-fuel based energy systems and large hydro-electric developments behind, not because we run out of oil,but because these new technologies are significantly cheaper and better. He uses the examples of moving from the stone age to the bronze age, or the film camera age to the digital camera age, not because we ran out of stones or film, but because significantly better technologies came along.

PROS: 1. I completely agree with almost everything. I'm particularly pleased to see Seba has not fallen for the hydrogen mirage. (If efficiency can be radically increased, someday I may be a fan of H2, but I'm not holding my breath.) 2. Unlike some authors, he doesn't give a heavy barrage of cute storytelling about the personalities and history, except where it's really relevant. 3. The book is obviously a polemic of sorts, but at least Seba doesn't go off on any diatribes about tangential political matters. CONS: 1. The graphics are just abominable. Some of the most important figures are not even readable. Heck, such spectacular stuff should be in color. 2. The copy editing is also awful. Misspellings, wrong word choices, often even entire missing words, or phrases that amount to gibberish. If the missing word is something like "billion," then it really matters! 3. As others have said, yes, by now it's out of date. Then again, the way things are going, I suppose it was inevitable. (I assume there's a blog.) 4. Just a suggestion, but something might also be added about what happens AFTER 2030. I could see PV being so cheap as to actually create problems, such as "satisficing" leading to stagnating progress in energy efficiency and other improvements. And with, say, a quadrilllion watts of cheap electrical capacity, what would we do with all that power? Capitalism being what it is, I'm sure there will be no problem coming up with uses. But with the clean energy transition accelerating faster than Ludicrous Mode in a Tesla, such thinking may be lagging behind developments.

I am the CEO and founder of Heart Transverter (...) and have been very actively involved in the very processes you so eloquently describe in your book. I started as a nuclear physicist but, as my eyes opened a little wider, realized the ultimate non-sustainable and very dangerous aspects inherent to nuclear energy and switched fields and ended up creating the inverter market. By the late seventies I was 100% in line with the conclusions of your book and have worked since to help them unfold as gracefully as possible. Some of the technical concepts I lay out here could be viewed as mere details of your premise but they actually are essential to the core concepts. In order for Solar Energy to be significant, from an ecological point of view, it has to be scalable and in its present form it can't really scale past about 15%. In order to be scalable it has to integrate energy storage and monitor and control all major loads in the home or business. The Transverter technology was designed to do just that. Read The Solarized Grid and watch Heart Transverter: OSIsoft Presentation for High-density Solar Integration on the Distribution Grid. When I created the inverter market by founding companies that are now owned by Schneider we realized transitioning to clean sustainable energy would be a long and complex path and grid tied residential solar did perform a critical step in that it demonstrated some scale and got the prices of solar down. Things really are evolving quickly in the Utility and Distributed Generation spaces. You are, of course, used to the mushrooming opportunity being addressed by many players Beyond Sprawl: A New Vision of the Future. Problem is this is causing enormous problems for the Utility companies and these problems are based on hard science and engineering, not just the utility's fear of losing market share. All you have to do is look into high solar integration areas, like San Diego SDG&E disrupts power to 115,000 to avoid wider blackouts. This is an interaction between CAISO and SDG&E and it is driven by the increasing need for spinning reserves caused by intermittent renewable sources, like solar, and increasing percentages of electronic loads. The Hawaiian solar market is in turmoil from this as is the German market. See Hawaii PUC chair defends landmark decision to end retail rate net metering. The economics of the different areas differ but the science is the same and the problem will only increase with more solar penetration. Private sector PPA's like Solar City & Vivint are used to competition but there is a new type of competitor emerging, the Utility company itself Big utilities enter market for small rooftop solar. The Utility companies understand the science behind these problems and value the solutions and can streamline integrating the benefits of ultra smart solar. The Utility, viewed as a competitor to PPA's, has the potential of having the upper hand as they can influence standards, laws and regulations as you have already seen in Hawaii, California, Nevada Louisiana and even Maine. Maine Utility Wants to End 'Net Metering' Policy. Rules, laws and regulations are always changing. If your effect is creating or magnifying problems then they will probably change against you. This can be seen with net metering being used by some to 100% offset the grid meaning that the grid has no revenue stream even though they still need to provide night time generation and an entire stabilizing grid structure and this drives things like Solar battle is on in the last state you'd expect. If you are solving the problems and, of course, waving your flag, then it is reasonable to expect the rules, laws and regulations to change to your benefit. This is already impacting the large PPA's SolarCity Inevitable Downward Spiral Has Begun and we are actively involved with presenting a solution through the mess that has been created. This rapid solarization has run into a brick wall as is evidenced by Sun Edison's difficulty with trying to acquire Vivint SunEdison's Troubles Are Far From Over and this is all with electric vehicles just starting to become significant. It is becoming clear that TOU (Time Of Use) rates being adjusted often with bi-directional energy flow being encouraged is not only interesting, but probably the only viable solution. This paves the way for EV batteries becoming the dominant energy storage asset for the utility, the home and the microgrid. Time Of Use rates should be implemented everywhere (worldwide) with the rates adjusted at least once a month and everyone should be encouraged to use them in both directions. This is like giving everyone Net Metering coupled with TOU with no limits. This, by itself, could provide absolutely the quickest path to a sustainable solution. TOU rates should even be allowed to go negative if needed. This would provide the needed investment to solve the energy storage issue and would automatically always be a good deal for everyone, the utility company, the truck driver, the home owner, etc. As the technology matures and sustainability approaches, the rates would always adjust to the new environment. For example, high integration solar would dominate the TOU rates (like has already happened in Hawaii) where the lowest rates would be in the middle of the day when people were at work and the highest rates in the early evening. Their EV's in the work place parking lot would be storing the cheap solar energy into their batteries and, in the evening, these EV's would be parked at their home and would make this same stored energy available. TOU rates would make it profitable.

This is an excellent book! The author's quantitative analyses and his immoderate enthusiasm for solar is the perfect combination of passion and rigor. Mr Seba shows us a big slice of our future, clearly and compellingly, and it's all the better because so few people grasp yet that he's correct. Nits: typos - very few of these cause confusion, for example it's obvious where $670 should be $670 million. Mr Seba blasts nuclear power as absurdly expensive, and he's entirely correct with respect to all commercial nuclear power plants now operating or being built. Not much attention is paid to new architectures such as molten salt reactors. This is fair, since for whatever reason these are not yet deployed, and so the jury is still out. The potential for nuclear power in mitigating climate change is still not completely clear to me, but however it goes with the nukes, solar will become the dominant energy source within a few decades, and this is Mr Seba's thesis. Very highly recommended.

The main idea is that exponential improvements in solar power and battery storage will cause a rapid, massive change in the transportation industry. This idea is fairly well developed. Unfortunately, the author overstates the negatives of non-solar technologies in order to promote solar power. The author could have let basic economics speak for itself. Despite this drawback, the book is thought provoking.

Written in 2014, read in 2024… most of what was predicted bu the book has become reality. Unfortunately Big Oil still has a strong grip on world politicians. Hope that sheer economics will end oil age soon.

Tony Seba has given great insights of future energy industry. I wanted to buy this book after I listened to the talk by tony seba, I wanted to get the detailed statestics which were covered by him in his talk. This book is a great read for those who want know details about future of energy industry and its market. Tony Seba has all the fact based details of how energy industry is going to get disrupted in near future and how when it is combined with Electric Vehicle will turn out to be deadly for oil and allied indutries... Read on...!

Good book that while now a little dated has stood the test of time. Easy to read and very clear in hypothesis and conclusion

A look into the future

Altamente recomendable para los que quieran tener una visión optimista y amplia del potencial de las nuevas tecnologías "limpias". Muy buen libro para conocer el verdadero potencial de la energía fotovoltaica, almacenamiento en baterías, coche eléctrico y coche autónomo, así como su potencial disruptor. Tengo una clara objeción al libro: Para llamar al libro "clean" falta una valoración de los costes medio ambientales de la producción de baterías y FV, que no se menciona una sola vez frente a las incontables valoraciones de los problemas medioambientales de otras tecnologías. De algún modo, ésto resta credibilidad a la tesis del autor.