New Paper: The Rapid Cost Dynamics of Clean Energy Technologies

A new paper by the MISES research team adopts the classical learning-by-doing framework of Wright (1936), which predicts cost (price) to fall as a function of the cumulative volume of past deployments. The team examines the learning rates for key clean energy system components (e.g., solar photovoltaic modules) and the life-cycle cost of generating clean energy (e.g., wind energy and hydrogen obtained through electrolysis). Calculations in this paper point to significant and sustained learning rates, which, in some contexts, are much faster than the traditional 20% learning rate observed in other industries. Finally, observed learning rates for individual technologies appear to reinforce each other in advancing the transition to a decarbonized energy economy.

You can read the paper here.