Perspectives on scaling up clean energy technologies in the energy transition

Carbon neutrality requires massive, rapid scaling up of clean energy technologies, with economic factors playing a central role in market uptake. We investigate how economic drivers and investment behaviors affect technology growth using a novel, multi-model analytical framework. By combining macro-level cost-driven technology diffusion with micro-level business profitability modeling, this framework captures realistic, investment-centric decision-making. Cost-competitiveness-dependent, varying technology adoption rates realistically reflect market growth and saturation, indicating a declining adoption rate as market share increases. Growth is initially influenced by technical and technoeconomic factors, but shifts toward complex systemic, social, and socioeconomic factors around the inflection point (halfway to saturation). This transition triggers, for instance, when solar PV share reaches around 20% of global electricity. At higher market shares, cost-competitiveness encompasses both basic technology costs and system-level limitations, better captured by the value-adjusted levelized cost of electricity than pure cost. Furthermore, micro-level profitability analysis underlines that sustained scaling up requires adequate business margins and profits. Growth can be accelerated through higher sales margins, reinvesting more profits into investments, reducing the time cash is tied up in sales, etc. Public support speeds up market entry but risks creating unhealthy competition and oversupply if sustained too long. Future technologies benefit from policies supporting a shorter development phase followed by rapid adoption. Finally, insights for future scaling up emphasize low costs, profitability, granularity, modularity, system flexibility, learning and scale effects, and technology-push versus market-pull trade-off. This multitude of factors stresses an integrated, multidisciplinary systems view to accelerate scaling up of clean energy.