This course analyzes scaling through a System-Oriented Innovation framework, built around the four stages every technology must survive: research, pilot, demonstration, deployment. At each stage a different constraint becomes binding, whether manufacturing, finance, policy, workforce, or public acceptance, and scaling stalls whenever one falls out of step. We look back at the three scale-ups that built the modern energy system, and ask what they teach us about the ones ahead. Solar became the cheapest electricity in history. Batteries went from camcorders to gigafactories in thirty years. Nuclear fission is the one case that grew more expensive over fifty years. Two threads run through all three. The first is cost: What does it take to make a technology cheap enough to win, which is where Wright's Law and learning curves come in. The second is whether the demand, capital, and factories can be developed quickly enough to support planetary scale build out. The quarter closes on three models of policy and coordination: China's industrial policy, United States policymaking, and the global coordination that eliminated chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) under the Montreal Protocol. Among the speakers are Dick Swanson, founder of SunPower, and Steven Chu, Nobel laureate and former US Secretary of Energy. Students present their own analysis in every module and again at the end of term. SUSTAIN SUSTAIN 170A/SUSTAIN 370A is the first course in a three-quarter arc: Scaling (Autumn), Financing (Winter), and Invention-to-Plant (Spring). The three complement one another but are self-contained and may be taken independently; none is a prerequisite for the others.
3 units · Letter (ABCD/NP)
This course analyzes scaling through a System-Oriented Innovation framework, built around the four stages every technology must survive: research, pilot, demonstration, deployment. At each stage a different constraint becomes binding, whether manufacturing, finance, policy, workforce, or public acceptance, and scaling stalls whenever one falls out of step. We look back at the three scale-ups that built the modern energy system, and ask what they teach us about the ones ahead. Solar became the cheapest electricity in history. Batteries went from camcorders to gigafactories in thirty years. Nuclear fission is the one case that grew more expensive over fifty years. Two threads run through all three. The first is cost: What does it take to make a technology cheap enough to win, which is where Wright's Law and learning curves come in. The second is whether the demand, capital, and factories can be developed quickly enough to support planetary scale build out. The quarter closes on three models of policy and coordination: China's industrial policy, United States policymaking, and the global coordination that eliminated chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) under the Montreal Protocol. Among the speakers are Dick Swanson, founder of SunPower, and Steven Chu, Nobel laureate and former US Secretary of Energy. Students present their own analysis in every module and again at the end of term. SUSTAIN 170A/370A is the first course in a three-quarter arc: Scaling (Autumn), Financing (Winter), and Invention-to-Plant (Spring). The three complement one another but are self-contained and may be taken independently; none is a prerequisite for the others.
Offered in Autumn 2026 at Stanford University.