Fossil fuels could have been left in the dust 25 years ago

Tim Harford

Gordon Moore’s famous prediction about computing power must count as one of the most astonishingly accurate forecasts in history. But it may also have been badly misunderstood — in a way that now looks like a near-catastrophic missed opportunity. If we had grasped the details behind Moore’s Law in the 1980s, we could be living with an abundance of clean energy by now. We fumbled it.

A refresher on Moore’s Law: in 1965, electronics engineer Gordon Moore published an article noting that the number of components that could efficiently be put on an integrated circuit was roughly doubling every year. “Over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not increase,” he wrote. “There is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means, by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000.”

That component number is now well into the billions. Moore adjusted his prediction in 1975 to doubling every two years, and the revised law has remained broadly true ever since, not only for the density of computer components but for the cost, speed and power consumption of computation itself. The question is, why?

The way Moore formulated the law, it was just something that happened: the sun rises and sets, the leaves that are green turn to brown, and computers get faster and cheaper.

But there’s another way to describe technological progress, and it might be better if we talked less about Moore’s Law, and more about Wright’s Law. Theodore Wright was an aeronautical engineer who, in the 1930s, published a Moore-like observation about aeroplanes: they were getting cheaper in a predictable way. Wright found that the second of any particular model of aeroplane would be 20 per cent cheaper to make than the first, the fourth would be 20 per cent cheaper than the second, and every time cumulative production doubled, the cost of making an additional unit would drop by a further 20 per cent.

A key difference is that Moore’s Law is a function of time, but Wright’s Law is a function of activity: the more you make, the cheaper it gets. What’s more, Wright’s Law applies to a huge range of technologies: what varies is the 20 per cent figure. Some technologies resist cost improvements. Others, such as solar photovoltaic modules,

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