The applicability of the learning and experience curves to predict future costs of solar energy technologies here has as its major test case the production economics of heliostats. The literature review indicated that the methods most often employed in past empirical studies to estimate and predict overall cost reduction in manufacturing new products are the "bottoms-up" engineering costs method, the engineering parametric approach, and aggregate cost estimation techniques. There are practical limitations to these methods when applied to predict cost reductions separately.
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