Technology Upscaling and Learning

Doctoral thesis of Marloes Caduff

It is well known that learning and experience often diminish economic costs with increasing maturity of a technology. We empirically analysed a large datasets of components, processes and technologies and found that also environmental impacts often scale non-linearly with cumulative production. This finding is important in environmental assessments, as in many cases new and old technologies are compared to each other, which may lead to misleading results if no correction for the different trajectories of the technology developments is performed