Well yes, but there is a backstory here of IEA refusing to believe in solar, severely underestimating its growth for every projection over the course of the past decade (assuming linear rather than exponential).
This has had real implications for investments in oil/gas/coal.
"Authorities finally realize infant will grow to adult."
This reminds me of the story where the Secretaries of Education of the German states recently found out that their projection for the number of first-graders in 5 years was off by about 400,000 (in a country of 80 million people).
Because, y'know, it's not like you could get any reliable data on how many people in your country will be six years old, five years from now...
How many people born in 2016 will come in, and how many will leave? (Hopefully child mortality is low enough and will stay low enough so as to not be relevant.)
400,000 is a 40% error on a population of 80 million with a life expectancy of 80 years. Unless 45% of recent asylum seekers were 6 years old, or unless 40% of 6 year olds emigrated (I don’t know which way the error went), that is too large a surprise to be so easily forgiven.
I never said a single factor fell into the 400k figure.
I'm also highly skeptical of the figure itself, as the total number of enrolled 6-year-olds is only 675k (97% of population) in 2012 (the last year the number was available), and for the years prior, it was pretty stable (+/- 50k). [1]
Being off by an order less than that makes some sense, but being off by 60% in a pretty stable country seems completely improbable.
Haha, I see reports now on someone in solar industry saying that IEA is still very sceptic about solar and downplays it as much as they can in their forecasts, even as they announce that the age of solar is here in words (sorry only links I have now in Norwegian.. https://www.dn.no/nyheter/2017/10/04/0900/Energi/slakter-iea...)
It's not just a small number increasing quickly, it already represents the majority of all new plants coming online: "165 gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the net expansion in electricity supply". Especially in China the solar growth is massive, at the expense of coal.
well why not extend the analogy further? it's worth noting that in this arrangement, the natural is order is the parent eventually dies after a long and possibly painful period of decline, while the child rapidly develops into an adult within 18 years, with the expectation of outperforming the parent by the time it reaches middle-age (35 or so). at which point the cycle repeats and continues.
this is HN, you have to think through your snark or it will snark you back.
That's no surprise. Your infant is likely being fed and cared for. Probably doesn't have to compete with NIMBYs. And it's probably not competing with over-subsidized megacorps for scraps.
