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The paper is "Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition"[1]. It documents "lines of best fit" spanning decades, and details the mecha
by tuatoru 4y ago
The paper is "Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition"[1].
It documents "lines of best fit" spanning decades, and details the mechanism: the experience curve/learning curve/Wright's law.
Standard methods (used by the IEA, the EIA, etc.) of snapshotting manufacturing technology and extrapolating costs based on the snapshot have consistently wildly over-predicted future costs.
After reading the paper I looked at PV, and I can see how PV prices can fall to approximately a tenth of today's, by means of R&D and manufacturing improvements currently in train. That took about 50 hours, so I haven't looked at other technologies in detail yet.
Batteries and electrolysis definitely are key technologies, but R&D effort is about three decades behind PV in terms of scale at this point.
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1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X