Cognitive Scaffold

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MENTAL MODEL · M4091

Swanson's Law

Swanson's Law
TechnicalHigh supportBiology
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Updated 2026-08-01

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INTRODUCTION

English translation pending.

CORE DEFINITION

Named after Richard Swanson, co-founder of SunPower, who described the relationship as a solar analogue of Moore's Law. Empirically, module prices have declined roughly twenty percent for each doubling of cumulative production, a learning rate that has held across several decades and several orders of magnitude of volume. The mechanism is learning by doing: manufacturing scale, process yield, supply-chain maturity, and incremental engineering all improve with accumulated output. The relationship is a statistical regularity rather than a physical law, it concerns cumulative production rather than calendar time, and it can break when input costs or physical limits dominate.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

psychology

Reduce cognitive load

- Cost forecasting: Extrapolate future prices from cumulative volume rather than from current price. - Technology screening: Check whether a candidate technology shows a learning rate at all. - Investment timing: Judge whether scale-up is the binding constraint or a materials limit is.

anchor

Anchor fast decisions

Each doubling of cumulative output gives manufacturers more repetitions of the same process, and repetition produces yield improvements, better equipment, and cheaper inputs through supply-chain competition. Those gains are retained rather than lost, so the cost curve declines as a function of total historical volume. Because the driver is accumulated experience, the pace depends on how fast the market grows, which is why deployment policy and price decline reinforce each other.

MINIMUM ACTION

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Source support: Explicit

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    en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_lawZH · Explicit
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