Selling Solar

To solve the climate crisis, the world must make a wholesale shift to renewable energy technologies. For the industrialized world, it is essential. But with surging growth in emerging markets, this transformation takes on even greater urgency. The challenges - and opportunities - are immense. Selling Solar considers how such a shift might happen. Focusing on the case of solar photovoltaics, it shows how at the start of the 21st century this promising technology began to diffuse rapidly in select emerging markets, after years of struggling to take off. What were the initial barriers to diffusion? How were they overcome? Who did it? And how can this success be replicated? Drawing on the literature on innovation diffusion and entrepreneurship the author shows how entrepreneurs affected profound technological change not just through the solar systems they sold, but through the example they set to both new market entrants and policy makers. These entrepreneurs were not waiting for an R&D breakthrough or a better solar panel to come along. They took the technology at their disposal, forged a new market, inspired new policies - and sold solar. In analysing how this happened, this book offers important lessons for the diffusion of a range of renewable energy technologies in emerging markets, and for the advancement of the sector as whole. Selling Solar is essential reading for anyone who believes in a renewable energy future and wants it sooner rather than later.