Three energy transition scenarios with Doyne Farmer

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Doyne Farmer
Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School

Doyne Farmer

Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School

Dr. Farmer is the Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Baillie Gifford Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. While a graduate student in the 1970s, Dr. Farmer built the first wearable digital computer, which was successfully used to predict the game of roulette.

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Podcast: Will the clean energy transition be cheaper than we thought?

In this Episode

Dr. Doyne Farmer, Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Oxford Martin School, and co-author of the recent working paper, Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition, sat down with Climate Now to explain why, even without considering the social cost of carbon, transitioning to renewables as quickly as possible will save the world trillions of dollars in energy costs.

In this short explainer video, Dr. Farmer breaks down 3 of their modeled scenarios.

Related Media:

Climate Now: May 17, 2022

Will the clean energy transition be cheaper than we thought?

The recent working paper by Rupert Way, Matthew Ives, Penny Mealy, and Doyne Farmer, Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition, suggests that the high estimates of the expense to transition to renewable energy have been inflated, and

Episode Transcript

Doyne Farmer:

In 20-25 years, we’ve pretty much gone all the way green. There’s no carbon emissions 25 years from now. So, we’re looking at, on the X axis we’ve got the year from 1880 to present, and on the y-axis, we have the cost that we’re putting in some standardized units in terms of the cost of generating a megawatt hour of useful energy. And what you can see is coal and oil, those have been going for 140 years, and the costs bounce around a little bit, but the trend is remarkably flat. In fact, from a statistical point of view, you can’t prove it isn’t flat.

Our first scenario, which we call Fast Transition, is a scenario where we just assume we stay on those same trajectories. If wind, solar photovoltaics, batteries, and green hydrogen, if those things just stay on their trajectories for another 10 years, and then they start to flatten out because by then they become dominant in the energy system, at that point, our forecast suggests that because those costs will continue to come down with high probability if we continue deploying, then we should see energy get cheaper than it’s ever been historically.

The slow transition, it’s like the fast transition, but slower, which means that natural gas hangs around for a lot longer. What it also means is that the costs don’t come down as quickly because we aren’t pushing things, as they would say, down their learning curve. We’ve even done one where we assume everything just stays in the proportions it is now, so if we’re generating 2 percent of our energy with solar energy we lock that in.

So these are in order of how expensive they are. We expect we’ll save on the order of $25 trillion by doing the Fast Transition over No Transition, and the Slow Transition comes out somewhere in between.

Source:

Way, R. et. al. (2021) Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition. Working Paper No. 2021-01. Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School.