Abstract
The twentieth century has witnessed an extraordinary progression of technologies for both energy sources and energy use. This chapter reviews three ‘enablers of change’ both of supply and demand for energy. The first is technological invention and innovation, including basic research, exploration and mining technologies, oil and gas discovery and coal mining. The second enabler is the learning curve, an empirical function depicting declining costs of products with accumulating experience, for example, for renewable energy. The third enabler is the declining marginal costs of production as production units become bigger, but saturation can be observed as the negative externalities of large-scale production overwhelm the capacity of the natural environmental system to absorb unwanted emissions. This is particularly worrying in the case of global climate change and its implications.
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Gibbons, J.H. (2012). Technology and Innovation. In: Toth, F. (eds) Energy for Development. Environment & Policy, vol 54. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4162-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4162-1_11
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