Title: Evaluating hardware and soft technology for rapid energy system decarbonization

Abstract: Technology hardware and deployment processes (“soft technology”) seem fundamentally different, but little work examines the nature of this difference and its implications for technology improvement. This talk introduces a conceptual and quantitative model to study the roles of hardware and soft technology in cost evolution and applies this model to solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. Differing properties of hardware and soft technology help explain solar PV’s cost decline, where rapid improvements in hardware affected globally traded components that lowered both hardware and deployment costs (“soft costs”). Improvements in soft technology occurred more slowly, were not shared as readily across locations, and only affected soft costs, ultimately contributing less than previously estimated. As a result, initial differences in soft technology across countries persisted and the share of soft costs rose. Complementing the case of solar PV, insights on cost dynamics in other technologies, including nuclear fission and electrolytic hydrogen production systems, will be used to outline conditions under which hardware and soft technology can enable and hinder cost reductions. More generally, this talk illustrates the usefulness of modeling dependencies between technology costs and features to understand past drivers of cost change and inform future technology development and adoption strategies.

Bio: Magdalena Klemun is an assistant professor in the Division of Public Policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). She is also affiliated with the HKUST Energy Institute. Magdalena’s research interests are in understanding how the economic and environmental performance of technologies evolves as a function of policy and engineering design choices, with a particular interest in the role of hardware vs. non-hardware innovations. Magdalena received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at MIT, her M.S. in Earth Resources Engineering from Columbia University, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar, and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from Vienna University of Technology.