PREFACEOne o f t h e main r e s e a r c h l i n e s o f t h e IIASA Energy Program i s t h e a n a l y s i s of t h e l o n g t e r m c o n s e q u e n c e s o f t h e u s e o f e n e r g y . F o s s i l e n e r g y l e a d s t o t h e r e l e a s e of v e r y l a r g e amounts o f C 0 2 i n t o t h e a t m o s p h e r e which due t o s l u g g y k i n e t i c s t a k e a v e r y l o n g t i m e u n t i l t h e y a r e e v e n t u a l l y d i g e s t e d i n t h e f i n a l s i n k o f t h e d e e p ocean.A s a consequence, C02 a c c u m u l a t e s i n t h e a t m o s p h e r e , and by a l t e r i n g t h e i n f r a r e d d i f f u s i o n it may provoke i m p o r t a n t c h a n g e s i n t h e e a r t h ' s c l i m a t i c a n d r a i n p a t t e r n s . I n o u r s t u d y w e t a k e a p o s i t i v e a t t i t u d e toward t h e problemi n t h a t w e l o o k i f it c a n b e s o l v e d o r r e d u c e d by t a k i n g p r o p e r m ea s u r e s i n t h e way o f b u r n i n g f o s s i l f u e l s . T h i s i s done i n t h e s p i r i t o f g e o e n g i n e e r i n g , which i s a k i n d o f " s y s t e m s y n t h e s i s " where s o l u t i o n s t o g l o b a l problems a r e a t t e m p t e d from a g l o b a l view. ABSTRACTThe problem of C02 c o n t r o l i n t h e atmosphere i s t a c k l e d by p r o p o s i n g a k i n d of " f u e l c y c l e " f o r f o s s i l f u e l s where C 0 2 i s p a r t i a l l y o r t o t a l l y c o l l e c t e d a t c e r t a i n t r a n s f o r m a t i o n p o i n t s and p r o p e r l y d i s p o s e d o f .C 0 2 i s d i s p o s e d of by i n j e c t i o n i n t o p r o p e r s i n k i n g t h e r m o h a l i n e c u r r e n t s t h a t c a r r y and s p r e a d it i n t o t h e d e e p o c e a n t h a t h a s a v e r y l a r g e e q u i l i b r i u m c a p a c i t y .The M e d i t e r r a n e a n u n d e r c u r r e n t e n t e r i n g t h e A t l a n t i c a t G i b r a l t a r h a s been i d e n t i f i e d a s one such c
FOREWORDEarly in its work the Energy Systems Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis recognized that one of the important controlling factors in changing the mix of technologies in the world's energy system was the rate at which a new technology substitutes for older ones, or, to put it differently, how long it will take a new technology to achieve a significant market penetration.In a series of important papers, Cesare Marchetti showed that over the last century energy technologies had exhibited remarkably stable market-penetration properties, a fact that became an important building block in the IIASA analysis of the world's energy future over the next 50 years.These results suggested that the form of stability exhibited by energy technologies could also be found elsewhere, and this paper explores this possibility for discovery, invention, and innovation cycles. Its findings show us that we have much to learn about these social processes that will be important to our efforts to shape our future effectively. WOLF HAFELE LeaderEnergy Systems Program TECHNOLOGICAL FORECASTING AND SOCIAL CHANGE 18, 267-282 (1980) Society as a Learning System: Discovery, Invention, and Innovation Cycles Revisited CESARE MARCHETTI ABSTRACTThe very simple heuristic suggestion that society as a whole and its numerous subsets operate like learning systems, basically governed by Volterra-Lotka equations, has been extremely valuable in organizing a most variegated collection of statistical sets of time series, ranging from the structure of energy markets to the efficiency of machinery and the expansion of empires. In this paper an attempt is made to treat invention and entrepreneurship, generally perceived as the most "free" of human activities but actually subject to iron rules. Invention and innovation during the last 250 years appear in precisely structured waves that lend themselves to robust prediction. The present wave will reach its maximum momentum around 1990. Furthermore, the introduction, maximum market penetrations, and prices of new primary energies show a very strong link to these innovation waves. This stresses once more that economic features may be the expression of deeper "physical" phenomena related to the basic working of society and thus become predictable up to a point through a very abstract and noneconomic analysis.This work has been done in the frame of IIASA 's Energy Systems Program and can be considered as an outgrowth of and complement to the research on the evolution of energy systems described in IIASA Research Reports 79-12, 79-13, and 77-22. There it was found that a new primary energy coming into the market must be observed for 10 or 20 years if urn: is to extract the basic features necessary to predict its long-term market behavior. Specifically, it was concluded that the dates at which new primary energies come into play cannot be predicted. In this paper innovations are considered not one by one but as an abstract set, whose behavior is analyzed. In this frame possible b...
We envisage a transport system producing zero emissions and sparing the surface landscape, while people, on average, range hundreds of kilometres daily. We believe this prospect of 'green mobility' is consistent in general principles with historical evolution. We lay out these general principles, extracted from widespread observations of human behaviour over long periods, and use them to explain past transport and to project the next 50 to 100 years. Our picture emphasizes the slow penetration of new technologies of transport, adding speed in the course of substituting for the old ones in terms of time allocation. We discuss in increasing detail railroads, cars, aeroplanes, and magnetically levitated trains (maglevs).
One of the objectives of IIASAYs Energy Systems Program is t o improve the methodology of medium-and long-range forecasting in the areas of the energy market and energy use, demands, supply opportunities and constraints. This is commonly accomplished with models that capture and put into equations the numerous relationships and feedbacks characterizing the operation of an economic system or parts of it. Such an approach encounters many difficulties, which are linked to the extreme complexity of the system and the fairly short-term variation of the parameters and even of the equations used. Consequently, these models lend themselves to short-and perhaps medium-range predictions, but normally fail to be useful for predictions over a period of about 50 years, the time horizon that the Energy Systems Program has chosen for study.Following the current scheme of attacking similar problems in the physical sciences, we have left aside all details and interactions, and have attempted a macroscopic description of the system via the discovery of long-term invariants. Heuristically, this approach is certainly not new. In a broad sense, the sciences can be seen as a systematic search for invariants.This work is dedicated to the empirical testing and theoretical formulation of an invariant, the logistic learning curve, as it applies to the structural evolution of energy systems and systems related to energy, such as coal mining. The great success of the model in organizing past data, and the insensitivity to major political and economic perturbations of the structures obtained seem t o lend great predictive power to this invariant.This Research Report represents only part of the work done at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, under a grant from the Volkswagenwerk Foundation, FRG, on the potential of logistic analysis in describing energy systems. It is completely documented in the Administrative Report to the foundation entitled "The Dynamics of Energy Systems and the Logistic Substitution Model" (Marchetti et al. 1978).The present paper reproduces the descriptive part in Section B of the Administrative Report. The software is described by Nakicenovic (1 979). As for the theoretical treatment in Section C by Peterka, a new issue of "Macrodynamics of Technological Change: Market Penetration by New Technologies" is available (Peterka 1 977). Fleck's contribution to Section C on the regularity of market penetration is part of his forthcoming doctoral dissertation at the University of Karlsruhe. Section A of the Administrative Report is the executive summary.
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