In a thrilling paper with the very un-thrilling title “Empirically Grounded Technology Forecasts and the Energy Transition,” a team of researchers found that the price of oil, gas, and coal, after adjusting for inflation, is about what it was 140 years ago.18 But renewable energy keeps crushing expectations. The authors looked at 2,905 projections for solar costs made by the most popular forecasting models and found that solar costs were expected to fall by 2.6 percent a year and never by more than 6 percent. In reality, they fell by 15 percent per year, year after year.
