Selling Solar

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To solve the looming climate change crisis, the world will need to make a profound technological shift to cleaner sources of energy. One technology that has enormous potential, especially in rural areas of many emerging markets, is solar photovoltaic technology for electricity. And yet, the progress of this technology has been disappointingly slow since its introduction in the 1980s. In Selling Solar the author seeks to explain why this has been the case, arguing that the market for solar has been ready for the last decade, it just took time for entrepreneurial firms to pioneer this new business, and for the right policies to take shape to encourage and support them. Once that happened, diffusion ramped up leading to the beginning of what can truly be called a solar revolution. The author draws on the compelling, but often overlooked, literature on innovation diffusion to guide the analysis. Such literature has tremendous applicability to understanding the up-take of solar energy, as it does to the up-take of other green innovations. The author then adds to this literature, by drawing in the transformative impact of entrepreneurs and their firms. Selling Solar puts business at the centre of its analysis, as the pivotal agent that will drive change, but also recognizes that business responds to incentives set by policy. The author reviews which policies have and have not worked for solar in emerging markets. He concludes by calling on market mechanisms, such as carbon markets, to be made to work for solar, and considers the broader lessons for clean energy diffusion.