We study the cost of coal-fired electricity in the United States between 1882 and 2006 by decomposing it in terms of the price of coal, transportation cost, energy density, thermal efficiency, plant construction cost, interest rate, capacity factor, and operations and maintenance cost. The...

We study a simplification of a previously proposed model of technology evolution to understand the behavior of performance curves, which describe how a technology improves with increasing cumulative production. The model decomposes a technology or production process into components that get...

We study the costs of coal-fired electricity in the United States between 1882 and 2006 by decomposing it in terms of the price of coal, transportation costs, energy density, thermal efficiency, plant construction cost, interest rate, and capacity factor. The dominant determinants of costs at...

We study a simple model for the evolution of the cost (or more generally the performance) of a technology or production process. The technology can be decomposed into n components, each of which interacts with a cluster of d-1 other, dependent components. Innovation occurs through a series of...