I've noticed a curious thing of late. In a few good news articles and videos, there are very good researchers applying Moore's Law to more than just CPUs. What we are finding is that humans have a capacity for refining any process for efficiency and that Moore's Law provides a sort of standard to measure our progress.
Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, published a paper predicting that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years. In other words, Moore predicted that our efficiency for packing transistors on a single circuit would increase by 100% every two years. This prediction has proven accurate over decades by numerous electronics manufacturing companies that now use Moore's Law for product planning.
Here is where it gets interesting. In 2011, an article in Scientific American demonstrated that a trend was emerging for solar panels. Costs were going down. Manufacturing capacity was going up. Efficiency was going up, too. Now we're not seeing a doubling or halving every two years, but in some cases we're seeing impressive improvements that line up well with Moore's Law in our capacity to capture solar energy.
At The Long Tail Pipe, despite some claims that there is no Moore's Law for batteries, David Herron makes a pretty well supported claim that there is, and he did that 4 years ago. It's just more like 10 years rather than 2 years to double capacity for batteries.
I can recall that when the first battery powered cars came out, the range was somewhere around 80-120 miles on a charge. Now Tesla offers cars with more than 300 miles for range. And Electrek, the business and technology journal, has crunched the numbers to find that the median range for electric cars has increased by 56% during the last 6 years. So perhaps there is a 12-year Moore's Law for electric car batteries at the least.
As a side note, Bloomberg did a very interesting animated video to demonstrate that the way we get power is about to change forever. The take away from their video is something called "The Experience Curve". The Experience Curve says that the more we make of something, the more efficient we get at making that thing. Bloomberg has also crunched numbers to show that every time the number of solar panels doubles, the cost to make them drops by 28%. They go on to say that the same trend is possible, even likely to occur with batteries.
But the story doesn't end there with batteries and solar panels. My final example is from a Ted Talk by Michael Laberge, about fusion energy, you know, the energy source that is always 30 years away from commercialization? Well, it is still about 30 years away from commercial production, but over the last 50 years, scientists have observed a sort of Moore's Law with fusion power. You can watch the video here:
General Fusion, a company dedicated to commercializing fusion power, gave a talk a few years ago with a slide that confirms the same thing: the results of consistent work on the problem of generating energy with nuclear fusion have followed Moore's Law. You can review the PDF of their presentation deck here (see slide 7 for the chart):
http://pbnc2014.org/plan_present/4_Delage_General%20Fusion%202014%2008%2026.pdf
Once again, we can chalk up these improvements to The Experience Curve. With every iteration, with every attempt, and with every success, we learn from it. We learn from doing, and often, we learn more when we make mistakes than when we get it right. The bottom line is that we are continually making progress in energy production, from solar power, to batteries, to harnessing the power of the sun directly.
While Moore's Law gives us a model to follow for improvements to technology, the steady improvements over time give me hope for humanity.