In their report ‘A new perspective on decarbonising the global energy system’, published in April this year, Doyne Farmer, Matthew Ives and Rupert Way drew on over a decade of research on probabilistic cost forecasting methods shown to make reliable predictions when empirically tested on more than 50 technologies. These methods are employed to estimate future energy system costs which show that, compared to a fossil-fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition will likely result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars.

In this presentation, they will discuss their research and explain why their conclusions differ so radically from most energy-economics models, and how the decades-long increase renewable energy technologies deployment have consistently coincided with steep declines in their costs. Further, they will demonstrate that if solar photovoltaics, wind, batteries and hydrogen electrolyzers continue to follow their current exponentially increasing deployment trends for another decade, a near-net-zero emissions energy system is achievable within twenty-five years. Finally, the discussion will look at the potential of these findings for policy action and their implications for the goals of the Paris Agreement.