costs
Wind Farm Cost Reductions Since the Mid-1990s
You know that one of my favorite sports is bagging on forecasts of all types, so when I come across one that’s pretty decent, I think it’s worth highlighting. Here, we see that the Department of Energy’s 1996 forecast (drawn from here) does pretty well. They overprojected the price declines up until 2000, but as [...]
Solar Thermal’s Learning Curve Says It’ll Be Competing with Coal Soon
How far away from competing with coal is solar thermal technology?
Not far, says David Wheeler, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. With $4-8 billion dollars of learning curve investments over the next five years or so, a new solar thermal plant would be competitive with a new coal plant.
He looked at the [...]
The Amnesiac Civilization and Energy
I picked up Vaclav Smil’s Energy at the Crossroads yesterday at Moe’s in Berkeley. A historian of technology at the University of Calgary, he points out that our large-scale “prime movers” were created before 1920. Turbines and internal combustion engines do almost all human work — and that gives them incredible social and technical inertia. [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
