ABSTRACT
Society requires new models for accelerating innovation in low-carbon technologies. The motivation for writing this book is the pathway solar photovoltaics (PV) provide from invention to widespread adoption that emerging low-carbon technologies can follow. The costs of solar PV modules have fallen by more than a factor of 10,000 since they were first commercialized and, in sunny places, are now cheaper than any other form of electricity. The success of PV motivates the three research questions for this project: 1) how did PV become so cheap? 2) why did it take so long? and 3) how can PV serve as a model for other low-carbon technologies? This project uses these core concepts from the National Innovation Systems literature to analyze the evolution of PV. The following core characteristics of PV were central to its evolution: scientific understanding, mass production, tolerance for design compromises, modular scale, suitability in niches, and opportunities for technology spillovers. While PV success is worth emulating, the urgency of addressing climate change means we need to develop scale-up pathways that function faster than PV has. A focus of the book is thus on how to speed up the process of innovation.
