Electricity and Control December 2023

ENGINEERING THE FUTURE

The analysis indicates two possible strategies to reduce soft costs: developing hardware improvements that could simplify soft technology variables, or focusing only on soft technologies to improve efficiencies. ised equipment that could reduce on-site installation time. Or researchers could target soft technology features di rectly, without changing the hardware, perhaps by creating more efficient workflows for system installation or automat ed permitting platforms. “In practice, engineers will often pursue both approaches, but separating the two in a formal model makes it easier to target innovation efforts by leveraging specific relationships between technology characteristics and costs,” Klemun says. “Often, when we think about information processing, we are leaving out processes that still happen in a very low tech way through people communicating with one another. But it is just as important to think about that as a technology as it is to design clever software,” Trancik notes. In future, she and her collaborators want to apply the quantitative model they created to study the soft costs relat ed to other technologies, such as electric vehicle charging and nuclear fission. They are also interested in better under standing the limits of soft technology improvement, and how better soft technology could be designed from the outset. This research is funded by the US Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office. The paper is titled Mechanisms of hardware and soft technology evolution and the implications for solar energy cost trends as was published in Nature Energy .

Soft technology costs could include simplifying permitting practices, supply chain management and system design processes, among other factors. decline could be attributed to reductions in soft costs tied to improved module efficiency. The framework shows that, while hardware technology features tend to improve many cost components, soft tech nology features affect only a few. “This structural difference is evident even before data is collected on how the technologies have changed over time. That’s why mapping out a technology’s network of cost dependencies is a useful first step to identify levers of change, for solar PV and for other technologies,” Klemun notes. Static soft technology The researchers used their model to study several coun tries, as soft costs can vary widely around the world. For in stance, solar energy soft costs in Germany are about 50% lower than those in the US. The analysis showed that because hardware technology improvements are often shared globally this led to dramatic declines in costs over the past few decades across loca tions. Soft technology innovations typically are not shared across borders. Moreover, the team found that countries with better soft technology performance 20 years ago still have better performance today, and those with worse per formance did not see much improvement. The country-by-country difference could be driven by regulations and permitting processes, cultural factors, or by market dynamics such as how firms interact with each other, Trancik says. “But not all soft technology variables are ones that one would want to change in a cost-reducing direction, like lowering wages, for instance. So there are other considerations, beyond just bringing the cost of the technology down, that we need to think about when inter preting the results,” she says. The analysis points to two strategies to reduce soft costs. For one, scientists could focus on developing hard ware improvements that make soft costs more dependent on hardware technology variables and less on soft technol ogy variables, such as by creating simpler, more standard

For more information visit: https://news.mit.edu/2023

DECEMBER 2023 Electricity + Control

31