Do We Have the Energy for the Next Transition?

The story by R. A. Kerr in the special section on Scaling Up Alternative Energy ("Do we have the energy for the next transition?", News, 13 August 2010, p. 780) emphasizes the problems besetting current efforts to push and pull low-carbon energy technologies to mass market. Observed historical scaling dynamics offer important lessons here.

Over the past 100 years, both industries and individual energy conversion units have grown substantially in scale. A meta-analysis of "successful" energy technologies from refineries to light bulbs reveals consistent patterns in these combined industry level and unit level dynamics (1). These patterns have important implications for the scaling-up challenge.

First, increases in unit scale follow a lengthy period of experimentation with many smaller-scale units. Through this formative phase, knowledge and skills for capturing available scale economies are accrued. History cautions against rapid jumps in the unit scale of technologies, particularly if commercially unproven [such as pre-combustion carbon capture and storage (2)].

Second, heterogeneous market niches for an emerging technology favor flexible over large unit scales. Use of many units servicing diverse demands at different scales is an alternative strategy for scaling up. The historical exemplar is natural gas power, ranging from kW to GW applications (3).

Third, the main growth phase of an industry lags increases in unit scale by up to 20 years. Scaling up entails incrementalism and consistency. Private expectations and investments cannot be strategically managed, but public R&D and policy mechanisms can. The history of energy technology shows that past innovation failures can often be attributed to stop-start policies coupled with early over-exuberance, as well as uncertain market demand leading to boom-bust finance [for example, see (4)].

Scaling up technologies takes time. The critical need for experimentation, improvement, and adaptation to user needs, means technologies take decades, not years, to reach the take-off point for widespread diffusion (5). The principal lesson from history? Patience is a virtue.

Charlie Wilson

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria.

References

1. C. Wilson, Meta-analysis of unit and industry level scaling dynamics in energy technologies and climate change mitigation scenarios, [International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria, 2009].

2. R. S. Haszeldine, Science, 325, 1647 (2009).

3. T. H. Lee, Combined Cycle Systems: Technology and Implications, in The Methane Age, T. H. Lee et al., Eds. (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1987), pp. 131–146.

4. M. Taylor, Energy Econ. 30 (6), 2829 (2008).

5. G. J. Kramer, M. Haigh, Nature 462, 568 (2009).