The experience (learning) curve

Assembled from 25 blocks · 3 evidence · 21 related

1. Story
2. The empirical regularity that unit cost falls by a roughly constant percentage for every doubling of cumulative production — not for every year that passes, and not for every research dollar spent. Formulated by Theodore Wright in 1936 from airframe assembly data and generalised since across hundreds of manufactured products, it is a relationship between cost and cumulative *output*, which is why it describes things that are built repeatedly on a production line far better than things that are built once on a site. The fitted rate is the learning rate: the percentage cost reduction per doubling. Photovoltaic modules have sustained a learning rate commonly fitted around twenty per cent per doubling across decades; lithium-ion cells a comparable figure; wind turbines a lower one; and on-site constructed generation frequently none at all, or a negative one. Two consequences matter for forecasting. First, a technology on a learning curve gets cheap as a function of how much of it is deployed, so deployment policy is cost policy. Second, forecasts that extrapolate cost from the present rather than from cumulative volume will systematically underestimate a technology that is scaling — which is the documented failure mode of a generation of official energy projections. Not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. The experience (learning) curve
5. Theodore Paul Wright
6. Connections
7. Theodore Paul Wright
8. Photovoltaic solar generation
9. The horizontal-axis wind turbine
10. Lithium-ion battery storage
11. Nuclear fission power
12. International Energy Agency
13. Wright publishes the airframe cost-quantity relationship
14. The conventional start of the photovoltaic module price series
15. Germany's Renewable Energy Sources Act takes effect
16. Chinese manufacturing takes over the photovoltaic supply chain
17. The photovoltaic learning curve is popularised as Swanson's law
18. Vogtle Unit 4 enters commercial operation
19. Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition
20. The experience (learning) curve
21. Wright publishes the airframe cost-quantity relationship
22. Evidence
23. Establishes that unit production cost falls by a roughly constant proportion with each doubling of cumulative output — the relationship later called Wright's law and applied to energy technologies. V55 verification basis: neither WebSearch nor WebFetch was available in this session; the citation and its content are stated from author knowledge of the paper as it is cited throughout the technology-learning literature, and the page range is deliberately omitted because it could not be confirmed.
24. Supports the finding that probabilistic forecasts built on observed cost-versus-cumulative-deployment relationships have outperformed the expert and official projections used in energy planning, and that solar, wind and storage costs have fallen at rates those projections repeatedly failed to anticipate. V55 verification basis: the paper was not retrieved in this session; the citation follows the reference declared in the Journey catalogue and the substance is stated from author knowledge. The fitted learning rates and their intervals were NOT read and are not quoted.
25. Supports the sectoral emission structure used throughout this pack, the treatment of industry process emissions as distinct from energy emissions, the assessment of technology cost declines in solar, wind and storage, and the identification of aviation, shipping and heavy industry as hard-to-abate. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; no chapter, table or page number is cited because none could be confirmed, and every sectoral share attributed here is given as a range rather than a figure.