Decarbonising the global energy system

In a report published earlier this year, Doyne Farmer, Matthew Ives and Rupert Way drew on over a decade of research on probabilistic cost forecasting methods shown to make reliable predictions when empirically tested on more than 50 technologies. These methods are employed to estimate future energy system costs which show that, compared to a fossil-fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition will likely result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars.

In this presentation, they discuss their research and explain why their conclusions differ so radically from most energy-economics models, and how the decades-long increase renewable energy technologies deployment have consistently coincided with steep declines in their costs.