What has a decade of disruption taught us about Australia’s energy future? Eight years of GenCost shows how technology trends and global events are influencing the transition to low-emissions electricity.
GenCost began as a straightforward research exercise: a way to track how electricity generation and storage technologies were changing, and what those shifts meant for Australia’s future energy system. When the first CSIRO-led cost projections were released in 2017, the work was grounded in stable global conditions and predictable technological trends.
Paul Graham is CSIRO’s Chief Energy Economist and GenCost lead, and he remembers those early days clearly.
“It was a reasonably simple exercise back then, because the global environment was relatively stable and we could focus almost entirely on how technologies were improving,” Mr Graham recalled.
Costs for wind, solar PV and batteries were falling year after year, and the challenge was simply to forecast how far and how fast they would continue to drop. At the time, GenCost was primarily concerned with understanding the inherent characteristics of technologies: how manufacturing scale, learning rates and deployment would shape future costs.
