Tony Seba is a lecturer at Stanford University who was given the opportunity to address the Thailand energy sector. He spoke about four key areas that would see rapid change and bring the most market disruption: energy storage, self-driving cars, electric vehicles and solar. He referenced a report that said that the U.S. and Canada would be running off 80 percent renewable power by 2030, saying the report lacked any truth.
Seba thinks that consumers would be fully utilizing electric vehicles by 2020 and by that time hopefully fossil fuels would become obsolete. He fully believes that by 2025, gasoline and diesel cars will no longer be sold but also concedes that the sales of EVs will not be enough to fully diffuse fossil fuels in our world today.
Disrupting the car industry is something we have already seen taking place, however, what about solar energy and moving away from utility grids all around the world?
“You have to ask yourself if solar keeps doubling every two years, how much more doublings before solar is 100 percent of the world’s energy– and not just electricity,” said Seba. He says that subsidizing solar is the most disruptive things governments can do to businesses that are currently making money on fossil fuels. “All of this leads me to believe that solar will be by far the number one form of energy, and by 2020, it will basically wipe out every other form of energy.”
Therefore, Seba thinks the 2030 projection by some scholars is wrong and rather the aim should be that by 2020 the world will be fully on solar and renewable energy.
For more from Seba, check out this video below on what will be disrupting the fossil fuels market and causing them to fully collapse by 2030:
