To continue reducing the costs of solar energy and other clean energy technologies, scientists and engineers will likely need to focus, at least in part, on improving technology features that are not based on hardware, according to MIT researchers.
The framework shows that soft technology hasn't improved much over time -- and that soft technology features contributed even less to overall cost declines than previously estimated. In the past, scientists have modeled the change in solar energy costs by dividing total costs into additive components -- hardware components and nonhardware components -- and then tracking how these components changed over time."But if you really want to understand where those rates of change are coming from, you need to go one level deeper to look at the technology features. Then things split out differently," Trancik says.
The framework shows that, while hardware technology features tend to improve many cost components, soft technology features affect only a few.