“In its first decades, the oil business provided an industrializing world with a product called by the made-up name of “kerosene” and known as the “new light,” which pushed back the night and extended the working day. At the end of the nineteenth century, John D. Rockefeller had become the richest man in the United States, mostly from the sale of kerosene. Gasoline was then only an almost useless by-product, which sometimes managed to be sold for as much as two cents a gallon, and, when it could not be sold at all, was run out into rivers at night. But just as the invention of the incandescent light bulb seemed to signal the obsolescence of the oil industry, a new era opened with the development of the internal combustion engine powered by gasoline.”

Excerpt From: Yergin, Daniel. “The Prize”. Apple Books.

From the 2008 preface. The idea that a revolution will happen only once PV energy will be priced so low that it will be sold cheap, dispersed into ground, wasted. Before new application will be found and revolutionise the world (hydrogen? what else?)

Comes to me from reading Gilder and Telecosm, this quote found on wired by googleing “waste the bandwidth” the tagline of Gilder’s book that stuck to me:

“You had to “waste” the power of the steam engine and its derivatives in order to prevail, whether in war or in peace. Over the last 30 years, we’ve seen transistors (or switching power) move from being expensive, crafted vacuum tubes to being virtually free. So today, the prime rule of thrift in business is “waste transistors.” We “waste” them to correct our spelling, to play solitaire, to do anything. As a matter of fact, you’ve got to waste transistors in order to succeed in business these days.

My thesis is that bandwidth is going to be virtually free in the next era in the same way that transistors are in this era. “

Now it’s paywall, should i link it ? Ok I ll link it https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gilder-4/