I'm speaking today about progress in renewable electricity generation at the "Accelerating the transition" conference in San Francisco
My talk, titled "A rapid tour of recent developments in solar, wind, batteries and enhanced geothermal power generation" summarizes recent progress with renewables. The key slide is this one, from EMBER:
What many fail to understand is just how powerful manufacturing scale economies, network externalities, learning by doing, and other forms of increasing returns to scale can be. These effects drive down costs as we deploy more.
While fossil fuel technologies also experience learning by doing, they are in an ultimately losing battle with depletion, as fossil fuel deposits get harder and harder to access. Manufactured technologies harvesting renewable energy flows can continue to drive down costs for a very long time, and the abundance of such flows (solar in particular) means that there is no prospect of those cost reductions slowing down anytime soon.
Learning beats digging!
