Both Wright’s Law and Moore’s Law attempt to define the "experience curve.”Wright’s Law dates back to before WWII, and it requires/utilizes more data than Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law can be thought of as a special case of Wright’s Law subject to the assumption that production of transistors in digital chips increases at a specific exponential rate with the passage of time.
The obvious way to apply Wright’s Law is to plot
the cost per unit (or any other thing you hope will improve, such as the efficiency of a motor) on a log scale
against
the total quantity which has been produced to date - also on a log scale.Wright’s Law predicts that your data, plotted in this fashion, will fall on a straight line. You then fit a straight line to the data, and extrapolate into the future how much improvement will occur when, based on your estimate of the rate of production in the future. If you are talking about digital electronics, and you assume that the quantity will grow at an exponential rate with time, you have just switched over to Moore’s Law.
So we see that the variation of rate of production with time is the crucial lever which predictably controls the rate of improvement of any given process, not necessarily only in price per unit of production but also, possibly, in measures of quality of the units produced. Consider the example of the solar panel. Solar panels were a thing back in the 1960s, but their cost per capacity watt was so high that no one considered them unless other options were even more expensive/impossible - such as powering satellites in space. Consequently the rate of production stayed low until - even at that low rate of learning - the cost per watt started to be attractive to more and more applications.
Now rooftop solar is a thing, and has become more than just “a thing.” And the faster they get produced/installed, the lower the cost and the more they are bought and installed. Think: if your roof isn’t facing to the south, but is facing to the east and/or to the west, that isn’t exactly a show stopper if the installed price drops to half of what you would have paid for solar panels if your roof did in fact face south.
The big issue of solar power obviously is nighttime, and weather. But the cost of batteries is also headed down the Wright’s Law learning curve - and altho the effect of weather will never go away, cloudy days do not actually eliminate photovoltaic energy production.
The source article applies Wright’s Law to the time required to charge an EV battery up to 200 miles of range, and actually suggests that charging time might stop being a serious constraint within five years.
Dang impressive...
First build & successfully fly the first airplane, then develop an economics law...
Very interesting article, bookmarked for further study. Thank you for posting it.
Excellent post, cIc. Reminds me of the informative forum FR used to be. Thank you! aam
Y = cumulative average time (or cost) per unit
X = cumulative number of units produced
a = time (or cost) required to produce 1st unit
b = slope of the function
Oopsie!In the original the formula itself is a graphic which doesn’t copy over directly, and I forgot to check on that, getting bogged down in the details of my discussion instead.
Interesting... and thanks for posting.
ping
Interesting... and thanks for posting.
ping
I remember “marginal utility” that is that the last beer is less effective than the first beer.
All “green” power face the same dilemma’s
1.) When you need it the most, it produces the least, and if you try to store the power, all environmental benefit is lost and costs explode.
2.) While fossil fuels and nuclear have “economy of scale” and power density working to their advantage, these so called green power sources have the “law of diminishing return” apply to them in both respects.
As you stated, when you use more green power you begin to use the less than ideal locations for wind, solar and hydro, BUT you also begin to transport the power over longer distances on networks that are spread out, meaning not only a loss, but also a lot of copper for transmission lines, towers...
Of course because it’s “green” no one in our media asks about minor things like what’s to come with all those composite turbine blades? How much land is being devoted to wind turbine farms, how much digging is being done, concrete is used and access roads are built. What does it really mean economically when you have a bunch of little turbines that all require maintenance spread out all over the countryside?
No none really wants to dig to much (pun intended) about where some of the materials used in the batteries come from, the working conditions, use of child labor, safety, environment... Looking into how filthy it is to manufacture some of these batteries or to recycle them isn’t a question you should ask and our MSM pretty much avoids that topic, after all green = good and EV’s are green. And then there is that minor detail that some of these green power sources use heavy metals in their production such as solar panels, or that these so called green power sources have their own environmental impact may that be with killing birds and being noisy, or changing the entire ecology of a river with hydroelectric...
But, they are labeled as “green” and as such everyone must bow down.
The EV is a chrome plated turd.
It’s what you get in a society where you can literally sell people artist $hit in a can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit
It’s all about feelings and perceptions for the people buying this care, what image they want to project, what groups they associate with, even how they vote or what gender they have... https://thenextweb.com/news/how-subaru-created-the-blueprint-for-selling-cars-to-lgbtqi-consumers
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