The World in 2030

The World in 2030 199
examining. Such offshore farms certainly work. Airtricity
already operates one in the Atlantic, and though it
currently has a capacity of only 25 megawatts, increasing
that merely means adding more turbines. 377
All of this leads us fairly neatly into a discussion about the
future of renewable and sustainable energy sources.
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Sources
All the forecasts about the mix of energy we will be using
in 2030 that I quoted earlier in this section are wrong. They
will be proved wrong because it is impossible to forecast how
energy generation and transmission technologies will develop
over the next quarter of a century. The one thing that all of
the worthy bodies making prognostications about future energy
sources and use patterns miss (or ignore) is that joker in
the pack: accelerating, exponential technology development.
I think it likely, almost certain, that energy from renewable
and sustainable sources will be well on the way to providing
the world with the majority of its ever expanding energy
needs by 2030; after all, the energy is all around us in the
wind, the waves, the rocks and the sun. Enough energy falls
on the Earth’s surface from the sun in a single hour to meet
the world’s current energy needs for a year. 378
The process appears to be well under way. In a report
called ‘Clean Energy Trends 2007’, Clean Edge, a research
organisation, stated: