Energy Technology Learning Through Deployment in Competitive Markets

Energy Technology Learning - Key to Transform into a Low - Carbon Society

“…The operations of the learning system are assumed to be determined by features, events and processes (FEPs) in the system environment. Contrary to earlier proposals, the cybernetic approach (Wene, 2007(Wene, , 2008a(Wene, , 2008b(Wene, , 2010 considers technology learning as inherent property of the learning system. Experience and learning curves express the eigenbehaviour (Varela, 1979(Varela, , 1984von Förster, 1984von Förster, , 1993 of an operationally closed system producing for a competitive market but acting autonomously based on its internal structure.…”

“…These differences must be explained within the theory in order to make confident extrapolations of experience and learning curves. Wene (2008bWene ( , 2010 discusses causes for the differences and his arguments are briefly recapitulated here together with some new observations. The three distributions are fitted assuming the same strength, S FEP , and Table I shows that the relation between positive and negative perturbations are about the same for all three sets of learning systems and technologies.…”

“…1. Experience curve and growth in global sales for photovoltaic modules (data for experience curve from Schaeffer et al, 2004;Wene, 2008b).…”

“…It is argued that the uncertainty in extrapolation can be effectively reduced through a better theoretical understanding of technology learning. Recent advances in a cybernetic approach to understand the phenomenon indicate that the observed dispersion of learning rates are due to the learning system adapting an internally well-defined learning mode to external perturbations (Wene, 2007(Wene, , 2008a(Wene, , 2008b(Wene, , 2010. The existence of these internal modes provides stability to the extrapolation.…”

A Review of Factors Influencing the Cost Development of Electricity Generation Technologies

“…Many authors argue that differences in market structure can affect the actual costs of a technology by, for example, influencing a company's internal efficiency [10] or the level of innovation within an industry [11]. Specifically, it is sometimes argued that technological learning requires competitive markets [12,13], although this view is not shared universally by the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between an industry's degree of competition and its level of innovation [14,15]. It should be noted that there is no dispute that the market structure and the respective level of competition has an effect on market prices.…”