Volts
Learning curves will lead to extremely cheap clean energy
September 28, 2022
About a year ago, a group of scholars at Oxford University's Institute for New Economic Thinking released a working paper that made a considerable splash in the world of energy nerds. It has now been peer-reviewed and published in the journal Joule. It is called "Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition," which, I think you'll agree, is a title that really gets the blood pumping.
At the heart of the paper is a new way of forecasting technology costs that is more grounded in history and empirical data than the integrated assessment models (IAMs) used by organizations like the IPCC and the IEA. Those models have notoriously overestimated the future costs of clean energy technologies, and consequently counseled insufficient climate action, for decades now.
The Oxford scholars take a different approach, centered on technology "learning curves" (sometimes called "experience curves").