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A comment on Decarbonising the energy system by 2050 could save trillions – Oxford study.

Re:Decarbonising the energy system by 2050 could save trilli... by robertlagrant on Monday December 12, 2022 @07:04PM (#33962418)
> The study shows the costs for key storage technologies, such as batteries and hydrogen electrolysis, are also likely to fall dramatically

What does this mean? It's not happened, but if we draw a line of best fit we can say we've "shown" it's likely?

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Re:Decarbonising the energy system by 2050 could save trilli... by tuatoru on Monday December 12, 2022 @08:19PM (#33963284)
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

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