Solar was dismissed as too expensive and/or too intermittent to have grid-scale use, but now solar is cheap as hell to deploy, and batteries are undergoing the same analyst-defying cost reductions, moving toward solving the intermittency issue.
Interesting concept as the data on innovation tends to indicate a few hard truths:
1) Most new ideas don’t pan out into breakthrough innovations.
2) Yet these innovations are the cornerstone of material progress.
3) The free market, sensing risk, tends to undersupply new ideas.
4) Governments attempt to plug the gap by subsidizing the creation of ideas, but are hamstrung also by fear of “failure” and therefore prefer to fund only incremental progress.
Perhaps we need to reframe our thinking along optimistic lines?
Particularly if you want to benefit the common good (like the government) you should be funding lots of high-upside research opportunities. As I think you've written elsewhere, government plays a crucial role de-risking new ideas.
A great example of a failure to utilize this kind of thinking is in solar. Analysts have systematically underestimated deployments (https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fzz9p8ekoss7d1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D713%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3De561b410cf951fb4d6e8e0e28b537b3ff8d55c86) and cost reductions (https://i0.wp.com/yaleclimateconnections.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/1022_learning-curves.png?resize=1568%2C954&ssl=1) for years.
Solar was dismissed as too expensive and/or too intermittent to have grid-scale use, but now solar is cheap as hell to deploy, and batteries are undergoing the same analyst-defying cost reductions, moving toward solving the intermittency issue.
Interesting concept as the data on innovation tends to indicate a few hard truths:
1) Most new ideas don’t pan out into breakthrough innovations.
2) Yet these innovations are the cornerstone of material progress.
3) The free market, sensing risk, tends to undersupply new ideas.
4) Governments attempt to plug the gap by subsidizing the creation of ideas, but are hamstrung also by fear of “failure” and therefore prefer to fund only incremental progress.
Perhaps we need to reframe our thinking along optimistic lines?
Particularly if you want to benefit the common good (like the government) you should be funding lots of high-upside research opportunities. As I think you've written elsewhere, government plays a crucial role de-risking new ideas.