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As we face the growing climate emergency, where the world is starting to warm itself with self-reinforcing feedbacks, and tipping points are fast approaching, it is instructive to look to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer for guidance and inspiration. The Montreal Protocol is widely acknowledged as the world’s most successful environmental treaty. It solved the first great threat to the global atmosphere from chlorofluorocarbons and other fluorinated gases that were destroying the protective stratospheric ozone shield. At the same time, the Protocol has done more to reduce the climate threat than any other agreement. This is because fluorinated gases are powerful greenhousegases, as well as ozone depleting substances. The Montreal Protocol and preceding efforts to eliminate CFCs have avoided an amount of warming that otherwise would have equaled the contribution from carbon dioxide (Velders et al. 2007).It is astounding that a single treaty has done this double duty so brilliantly. There are many lessons to be learned, including that the Montreal Protocol has always been a “start and strengthen” treaty: it started with mandatory control measures to cut fluorinated gases on a precise schedule, learned on-the-job by striving to meet the controls, and gained confidence from its initial success to do still more for the environment. The Montreal Protocol’s latest control measure is the 2016 Kigali Amendment to phase down hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, primarily used as refrigerants. While HFCs do not affect the ozone layer, they are potent greenhouse gases and phasing them down has the potential to avoid up to0.5°C of warming by the end of the century. The initial phasedown schedule of the Kigali Amendment ensures about 90% of this will be captured. Just minutes after the Kigali Amendment was agreed, the Parties to the Montreal Protocol passed the first of a series of decisions to improve the energy efficiency of cooling equipment in parallel with the switch from HFCs to climate-friendly refrigerants. Improving the efficiency of cooling equipment has the potential to more thandouble the climate benefits of the Kigali Amendment, with the combined potential to avoid the equivalent of up to 260 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2050. This will save nearly $3 trillion dollars in energy generation and transmission costs, in addition to reducing consumers monthly electricity bills, while also protecting public health and agricultural productivity by reducing air pollution. This synthesis report analyzes these and other benefits, and provides more detailed support in an accompanying assessment (Dreyfus et al. 2020). We should all draw courage from the success of the Montreal Protocol and the parallel efforts to improve energy efficiency of cooling equipment, which together represent one of the most significant climate change mitigation strategies available.

Fuel cells are both a longstanding and emerging technology for stationary and transportation applications, and their future use will likely be critical for the deep decarbonization of global energy systems. As we look into future applications, a key challenge for policy-makers and technology market forecasters who seek to track and/or accelerate their market adoption is the ability to forecast market costs of the fuel cells as technology innovations are incorporated into market products. Specifically, there is a need to estimate technology learning rates, which are rates of cost reduction versus production volume. Unfortunately, no literature exists for forecasting future learning rates for fuel cells. In this paper, we look retrospectively to estimate learning rates for two fuel cell deployment programs: (1) the micro-combined heat and power (CHP) program in Japan, and (2) the Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) in California. These two examples have a relatively broad set of historical market data and thus provide an informative and international comparison of distinct fuel cell technologies and government deployment programs. We develop a generalized procedure for disaggregating experience-curve cost-reductions in order to disaggregate the Japanese fuel cell micro-CHP market into its constituent components, and we derive and present a range of learning rates that may explain observed market trends. Finally, we explore the differences in the technology development ecosystem and market conditions that may have contributed to the observed differences in cost reduction and draw policy observations for the market adoption of future fuel cell technologies. The scientific and policy contributions of this paper are the first comparative experience curve analysis of past fuel cell technologies in two distinct markets, and the first quantitative comparison of a detailed cost model of fuel cell systems with actual market data. The resulting approach is applicable to analyzing other fuel cell markets and other energy-related technologies, and highlights the data needed for cost modeling and quantitative assessment of key cost reduction components.

The ongoing debate over the cost-effectiveness of renewable energy (RE) and energy efficiency (EE) deployment often hinges on the current cost of incumbent fossil-fuel technologies versus the long-term benefit of clean energy alternatives. This debate is often focused on mature or ‘industrialized’ economies and externalities such as job creation. In many ways, however, the situation in developing economies is at least as or even more interesting due to the generally faster current rate of economic growth and of infrastructure deployment. On the one hand, RE and EE could help decarbonize economies in developing countries, but on the other hand, higher upfront costs of RE and EE could hamper short-term growth. The methodology developed in this paper confirms the existence of this trade-off for some scenarios, yet at the same time provides considerable evidence about the positive impact of EE and RE from a job creation and employment perspective. By extending and adopting a methodology for Africa designed to calculate employment from electricity generation in the U.S., this study finds that energy savings and the conversion of the electricity supply mix to renewable energy generates employment compared to a reference scenario. It also concludes that the costs per additional job created tend to decrease with increasing levels of both EE adoption and RE shares.

Retrospective experience curves are a useful tool for understanding historic technology development, and can contribute to investment program analysis and future cost estimation efforts. This work documents our development of an analysis approach for deriving retrospective experience curves with a variable learning rate, and its application to develop an experience curve for compact fluorescent lamps for the global and North American markets over the years 1990-2007. Uncertainties and assumptions involved in interpreting data for our experience curve development are discussed, including the processing and transformation of empirical data, the selection of system boundaries, and the identification of historical changes in the learning rate over the course of 15 years. In the results that follow, we find that that the learning rate has changed at least once from 1990-2007. We also explore if, and to what degree, public deployment programs may have contributed to an increased technology learning rate in North America. We observe correlations between the changes in the learning rate and the initiation of new policies, abrupt technological advances, including improvements to ballast technology, and economic and political events such as trade tariffs and electricity prices. Finally, we discuss how the findings of this work (1) support the use of segmented experience curves for retrospective and prospective analysis and (2) may imply that investments in technological research and development have contributed to a change in market adoption and penetration.

This study provides an updated analysis of long-term energy system scenarios for California consistent with the State meeting its 2050 climate goal, including detailed analysis and assessment of electricity system build-out, operation, and costs across the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) region. Four key elements are found to be critical for the State to achieve its 2050 goal of 80 percent greenhouse (GHG) reductions from the 1990 level: aggressive energy efficiency; clean electricity; widespread electrification of passenger vehicles, building heating, and industry heating; and large-scale production of low-carbon footprint biofuels to largely replace petroleum-based liquid fuels. The approach taken here is that technically achievable energy efficiency measures are assumed to be achieved by 2050 and aggregated with the other key elements mentioned above to estimate resultant emissions in 2050. The energy and non-energy sectors are each assumed to havethe objective of meeting an 80 percent reduction from their respective 1990 GHG levels for the purposes of analysis. A different partitioning of energy and non-energy sector GHG greenhouse reductions is allowed if emission reductions in one sector are more economic or technically achievable than in the other. Similarly, within the energy or non-energy sectors, greater or less than 80 percent reduction from 1990 is allowed for sub-sectors within the energy or non-energy sectors as long as the overall target is achieved. Overall emissions for the key economy-wide scenarios are considered in this report. All scenarios are compliant or nearly compliant with the 2050 goal. This finding suggests that multiple technical pathways exist to achieve the target with aggressive policy support and continued technology development of largely existing technologies.