Heterogeneities in Energy Technological Learning : Evidence from the U.S. Electricity Industry

While the role of organizational learning in improving firms’ performance is well documented, there are still questions surrounding the dominant forces driving technological learning. This is particularly true in the electricity industry where the growth of renewable technologies has been pervasive. On the one hand, vicarious learning contributes to the adoption of emerging technologies through successful inter-firm knowledge management and conversion. On the other hand, vicarious learning also creates adoption resilience while still reinforcing intra-firm learn- ing. These two forces combine to define a “push-pull” phenomenon in the evolution of energy technologies. This paper investigates the differences in knowledge acquisition within and across electricity firms in the U.S. The learning curve model is applied to a longitudinal study of 5,573 U.S. electricity firms between 1998 and 2010. This study projects four findings: (i) The capacity growth of the solar photovoltaic technology is positively associated with intra-firm knowledge acquisition; (ii) The effect of financial incentives on the adoption of solar and wind technologies is higher under inter-firm learning; (iii) The higher the stringency of policy mandates, the more diversified is the progress on technological change across technologies; (iv) Knowledge spillovers across firms are higher for wind technology than for solar technology. Specially, these spillovers induce a higher learning rate for the wind technology. These findings combine to show disparities in the learning trends in technologies across and within firm boundaries. They further illustrate that policies aimed at increasing energy diversity must be cognizant of the boundary crossing of investment gains in energy technologies