Comment by duskwuff 6 days ago
And its inverse, the IEA solar energy forecast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predic...
(This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict that it'll level off any day now...)
Reminds of something I heard: Of the 3 most recent recessions, analysts predicted 20.
Very soon we will produce more solar electricity than all of the word's consumption. A "problem" that is even more severe than it looks like, because we consume energy when the Sun is under the horizon too.
So, yeah, in a few years they'll be right. Even if for just a short time while the rest of the economy grows to keep up with the change.
Those 2 charts are amazing! At least the Itanium people adjusted their curves downward over time, looks like the IEA just carried on regardless!
It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but, hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this is going to be a flop from the earliest days.
an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar
In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the fairly late 2000s. Yes, Intel apparently played a bunch of dirty pool but that was mostly about the desktop at the time which the big suppliers didn't really care about.
It’s understandable why companies try and sometimes succeed at creating a reality distortion field about the future success of their products. Management is asking Wall Street to allow them to make this huge investment (in their own salaries and R&D empire), and they need to promise a corresponding huge return. Wall Street always opportunities to jack up profits in the short term, and management needs to tell a compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting. Intel also wanted to encourage adoption by OEMs and software companies, and making them think that they need to support Itanium soon could have been a necessary condition to make that a reality.
I don’t know what factors would make IEA underestimate solar adoption.
There are trillions of dollars on the line in convincing people not to buy solar panels or other renewable sources.
Remember all the conspiracy theories about how someone invented a free energy machine and the government had to cover it up? Well they're actually true - with the caveat that the free energy machine only works in direct sunlight.
How often are they reality distortion fields vs leadership trying to put on a face to rally the troops and investors? How do you do the second without the first?
Something I ponder from time to time, while trying to figure out how to be less of a cynic and more of a leader.
> Management is asking Wall Street to allow them to make this huge investment (in their own salaries and R&D empire), and they need to promise a corresponding huge return. Wall Street always opportunities to jack up profits in the short term, and management needs to tell a compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting
Explain Amazon, Uber, Spotify, Tesla, and other publicly listed businesses that had low or even negative profit margins for many years.
The idea that Wall Street only rewards short term profit margins is laughable considering who is at the top of the market cap rankings.
The section of my comment you quoted directly addresses this! Wall Street can be convinced by a compelling story.
If they keep predicting that, eventually they’ll be right!
(It’s hard to harvest more power from a star than a Dyson sphere is capable of)