Solar Euphoria: The Rise of Photovoltaics to the Top

Photovoltaics (PV), the solar power, which was nothing a few years ago, is the world leader in clean and sustainable energy today. It has become low-cost and affordable for everybody: Millions of people have already invested in it. This book reports on the euphoria resulting from solar PV that started about half a century ago in the United States, followed by Japan. By the turn of the century was triggered the first PV market explosion in Germany, followed by the great financial and industrial turmoil ending up with China’s leadership. Today, the solar euphoria has embraced the whole world, with hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in millions of PV plants on buildings or on the ground. The book is a guide to investing while helping to save the environment. It tells everything about solar power.

Wolfgang Palz is a German physicist. For more than half a century, he has been a global leader of the development of solar energy and other renewables. As an official of the European Commission in Brussels, he was the manager of PV development in Europe for 20 years. From 2000 to 2002, he was a member of an ＂Enquête Commission＂ of the German Parliament on the German energy perspective on the horizon 2050. Later, he was a consultant for the EU Commission on PV programmes for the underprivileged in Latin America. Dr Palz has received numerous awards, including the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) Global Leadership Award in Advancing Solar Energy Policy (2011). He is a bearer of an Order of Merit of the German Republic.