Finlay Colville
Almost 40 years ago, during my undergraduate Physics degree course at the University of Glasgow, I became intrigued by various aspects of modern physics, in particular the interaction between light and matter, also known as quantum optics.
Academic textbooks on the curriculum for modern optics and quantum mechanics were, by nature, designed to help students pass exams. As effective as they were, the curious part of me was drawn to the evolution of the science and the underlying physics that had ushered in the scientific revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This turned out to be the catalyst for what has been a 40-year preoccupation with the societal context, the trailblazing individuals, the market-leading corporate enterprises and the fundamental science that coalesces at any given time to create technology breakthroughs.
The result was years of reading books written by other people which has been highly informative and undoubtedly motivational. However, in recent times – and specific to the solar industry – it seemed that most of the books were either academic in purpose or largely eulogising the economic case for solar energy deployment (often in a somewhat one-sided manner).
It dawned on me that there was a story of the solar PV industry that had yet to be told; one that traced the origins of the science and technology through to the people, companies and organisations globally that have shaped what is now a major high-tech sector, and about to reach an incredible landmark when annual manufacturing output will exceed and pass through the one terawatt barrier.
Witnessing the GW-to-TW manufacturing miracle
It transpires that I have probably been doing much of the preparation for such a challenge for 20 years; analysing, writing about, and presenting on, a major part of solar PV’s manufacturing journey.
I was fortunate also with the timing of my entry to the sector, and subsequent globetrotting to wherever PV manufacturing was seeing strong investments, as this overlapped with solar PV’s gigawatt-to-terawatt growth phase.
Back in the early 2000s, the industry was comprised mainly of technologists and solar enthusiasts whose interactions were always educational and inspirational.
Technical workshops and conferences were the go-to meeting places for the PV community, and new research ideas were constantly being tried out by companies seeking to scale differentiated product offerings to mass production status.
Japan was the major player in solar PV manufacturing at this time, with global brands such as Sharp, Sanyo, Kyocera and Mitsubishi Electric routinely in the top rankings lists for module supply volumes to the industry.
Europe and the U.S. were also highly engaged with the sector then, but with a more diverse range of stakeholders, including raw materials and production equipment suppliers, and manufacturers through the entire value-chains of both silicon-based and thin-film technologies.
The only other country at this time with a track-record in PV manufacturing, India, was largely comprised of small-to-medium sized module assembly companies serving domestic demand requirements.
Across Asia, the real action was happening. Taiwan was about to become the leading producer of solar cells globally, South Korea was eyeing the sector with the chaobols looking to supplant Japan in another high-tech arena, and contract-manufacturing styled fabs were being set up in countries such as the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia.
However, the period then was particularly notable because the foundations were being put in place in China for what was to become a PV manufacturing powerhouse that would completely transform the solar PV industry over the coming decades, and ultimately make the terawatt dream a dawning inevitability today.
Back to the mid-nineteenth century
While the achievements of many companies and solar pioneers during the past 20 to 30 years are truly heroic and groundbreaking, the complete story of solar PV is perhaps of more interest and relevance, in terms of appreciating the journey to the terawatt era.
When considering the origins of the solar PV industry, textbooks often draw reference to the thermal properties of sunlight being used to heat water, or experiments undertaken with electrolytic cells in solution, way before even the electron was discovered and understood.
I guess the physicist in me holds firm to the belief that the solar industry is, for all purposes, photovoltaics; put another way, without discovering the photon, solar PV does not exist.
Therefore, how the photon came to be discovered, understood and then used as the basis of one terawatt of solar panels produced annually, is – in my opinion – the real starting point that has led to the PV terawatt dream.
Furthermore, to understand the photon, one needs to go back to the mid-nineteenth century and the scientific framework being put in place through to the early 1900s. This period of scientific learning would then form the basis of most technological breakthroughs that would unfold in the twentieth century, within which the origins of solar PV manufacturing took shape.
The scope of the book
The final contents of the proposed book will likely be very different to what I imagine today. In fact, given the endless iterations I often go through for a single two-thousand-word blog on the industry, the book could easily fly off on any number of tangents. Don’t hold me to dates please.
Nonetheless, I think I have an idea of the scope now.
From a high-level standpoint, the book is going to be about the people, companies, technologies, strategies, challenges and successes of a century-plus journey; one that started with the understanding that light was quantized in 1905, through to zillions of these light quanta (photons) from the sun being absorbed by one of the most abundant elements on earth (silicon) some 120 years later by solar PV panels (modules), manufactured in huge factories (mostly controlled by Chinese companies), producing a terawatt of peak power in a single 12-month period.
Given how much I have enjoyed learning, understanding and writing about the solar PV industry in the past two decades, taking this to an altogether different level both scares and excites me in equal measures.
While it is easy to be wise-after-the-event – and somewhat dismiss historic activities in the sector (such as technologies pursued, government strategies employed, corporate decision making) as doomed-to-failure – one needs to remember that luck is often a determining factor; end-user incentives being cut back unexpectedly, raw materials being in short-supply pushing up costs, trade barriers being put in place by new government administrations, and so on.
The story should always be about the background and context that stimulated these plans in the first place; for example, what were the political, economic, technical and competitive factors at play that suggested a viable business model, or strategy, would work at all? Why were investment decisions made at any particular time? Were there any glaring risk factors that really should have been factored in?
I see the journey of the solar PV industry to terawatt status as having thousands of parts and somehow a blend of these managed to successfully build upon one another to the point that a terawatt segment came to fruition. I think explaining (but first learning) this in the book will be the kind of challenge that will never make for a dull day.
For this reason, I have set up a dedicated part of the Terawatt PV Research website to the book writing. This should allow me to populate it with lots of mini stories during the whole process, which I should add may be counted in years, not days.
Starting in Japan
No prizes for guessing that the book writing research starts with Japan.
While activities in the U.S. (and sometimes Europe) from the mid-1950s through to the early 2000s are often highlighted as the foundation of modern solar PV manufacturing, I have always believed that it is Japan that should take the credit for this. Specifically, the companies and government policies in Japan that created a domestic manufacturing strategy that was years ahead of its time.
But why did this happen in the first place?
To answer this, one needs to consider the journey that Japanese industrial manufacturing went through during the whole of the twentieth century, the nature of the companies that become global powerhouses in the automotive, consumer electronics and semiconductor industries, and the key people behind the companies that are still revered globally today with almost legendary status.
Japan’s role in the history of PV manufacturing would alone be a fascinating read. China rules the terawatt PV manufacturing transition today, but Japan ruled the gigawatt phase.
While several of Japan’s leading solar PV companies embarked upon building global manufacturing supply-chains across Europe and the U.S. (not to mention in China) – and one of the main players (Sanyo) was the proponent of the heterojunction cell architecture – the key ingredient was the ability to create a manufacturing-led policy and strategy that only China has since been able to emulate.
This collective national strategy in Japan for solar PV included the above-mentioned Japanese companies and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI, the former METI), and largely followed an industrial and manufacturing blueprint that had been the cornerstone of Japanese technical supremacy on the global stage during the second half of the twentieth century.
I can’t think of a more exciting place to start the book writing project.
