Ok, let's face it, no one in alternative energy is doing anything quite as well as Moore's Law. Let's just remind ourselves what it is ...

The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades.

From Webpedia.

Ray Kurzweil of course, would go much further. Roughly each year, computers chips will not only double their power, but the bandwidth of networks will triple and most importantly, the number of computational calculations per $1,000 will double too.

Now back to the starting theme of this post. An excellent article in the Economist this week In search of the perfect battery got me thinking, after looking at the chart entitled Super store. Solar PV efficiency is increasing by around 1 percent per annum. Today, your average new solar panel can crank out 15% efficiency, so by 2015, we could be up to 22%. According to the chart however, the projected rate of increase for power density in lithium ion batteries will jump from about 180 watt hours per kg to 320 - a nearly 80% increase. 

The other bit that caught my eye. According to Menahem Anderman, "between now and 2015 . . . the worldwide market for hybrid-vehicle batteries will more than triple, to $2.3 billion" and half of hybrid cars in 2009 will be using lithium ion batteries. Granted, that's a much slower growth rate than solar (approx 17% p.a.), which  will probably grow by at least 30% a year until 2015, yielding a 6 fold increase in production.  But the sheer size of the Global automotive industry, with probably close to, I guesstimate, $800 billion in annual sales, just might point to a growth curve for automotive lithium ion batteries on a par with solar, at the back end of the next decade. Especially, if Peak Oil finally kicks in by then.