ABSTRACT
When Wolfgang Palz in 1977 became the head of the EU Renew-able Energy program, the European terrestrial PV industry practically did not exist. About $1 billion EU money spent under the direction of Palz between 1977 and 1997 for research, development projects, and infrastructure resulted that in 1997 a European terrestrial PV industry existed, which manufactured 29.1 MWp (Annex. 8), close to 60% of what the dominant USA PV industry produced in the same year.It was unfortunate that Palz’s extremely well-structured program was basically dismantled, when Ms. Edith Cresson, who so far had spent the shortest time in office (May 1991 until April 1992) for any French prime minister of the Fifth Republic, because in a speech she compared the Japanese to “yellow ants trying to take over the world,”240 had to resign and subsequently in January 1995 became the EU Commissioner for Science and Education to which area the Renewable Energy program also belonged. One of her first activities was to approve and authorize that one third of the PV proposals 240https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89dith_Cresson.
