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OK. But what about the idea that renewable energy costs have no floor?
by TigeriusKirk 4y ago
OK. But what about the idea that renewable energy costs have no floor?
- addicted 4y agoThat’s not the claim in the article. From the article: > For example, as shown in Figure 3B, past floor costs used in IAMs have already repeatedly been violated. We know of no empirical evidence supporting floor costs and do not impose them (see Document S1 section “The use of floor costs in endogenous technological learning models”). So there is no claim that there will not be a floor. Just that the floor costs have been wrong for decades, and imposing them has led to extremely wrong predictions. So including them in an analysis is likely to again mislead rather than help. Also, there’s a whole bunch of discussion about not using floor costs. So the “critique” is not much of a critique since it does not engage with the actual claims being made and the detailed explanations justifying those choices.
- TigeriusKirk 4y agoI'm not seeing this as a distinction that makes any difference in the criticism.
- addicted 4y agoSo you think it’s better to include a factor that is unknowable and whose inclusion has consistently led to wrong analysis when the exclusion of that factor would have historically led to better results?
- TigeriusKirk 4y agoI think it's better to make an estimate than to assume the decrease will continue indefinitely, yes. I do think that.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pfdietz 4y agoIf we assume historical experience curves continue, that means there is no floor, except in the sense that costs are still nonzero when renewables reach 100% of the world energy supply. In that vein, expanding solar to supply the entire world will (on the historical experience curve) reduce module prices by another factor of ~4. Costs will continue to decline after that as modules are replaced, but that's an ever decelerating process that approaches, but never reaches, zero.