In Search of Large-Scale R&D for Photovoltaics
In a 2006 op-ed titled “A Million Manhattan Projects,” Thomas Friedman applauded the U.S. approach to developing clean energy technologies. He wrote, “Because we have this incredibly flexible, open, unrestricted, competitive economy…no one is waiting for Washington to declare the next big Manhattan Project, for, say, energy independence. American innovators are growing their own.”
While the U.S. government spends less than $200 million per year on PV R&D, venture capitalists have indeed been investing billions and corporations large and small are spending billions more—figures that suggest a comprehensive free market response to the challenge.
But the Manhattan Project was notable not just for its scale—$22 billion (today’s dollars) spent from 1942-46—but also its focus. At its peak, the project involved 130,000 people working on a related set of scientific, engineering, operations, manufacturing and logistics challenges. It was, after all, one project.
Sure, in aggregate a lot of money has been bet on PV in recent years. But look closer and you will see that the bets are being made in a disconnected array of small or relatively small R&D projects addressing many diverse technologies. No single PV company spends even $100 million per year on R&D—the solar market is too small and the industry too fragmented. Promising concepts that are further from commercialization are particularly underfunded with our laissez-faire approach.
The R&D landscape will naturally evolve as the industry grows and consolidates, but that process will take many years and success remains uncertain. We can’t just keep buying lottery tickets hoping to get lucky. The U.S. needs a genuinely large-scale public-private effort to expand photovoltaics research, a National PV Center of Excellence, equipped with the best process and characterization equipment, staffed with top-notch scientists and engineers, and run with a true sense of purpose and urgency.
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Barton commented:
You already have the basis for a PV centre of Excellence at Georgia Tech. They are active in PV R
Dirk Ortloff commented:
A National Centre of Excellence is certainly something that the PV industry could benefit from. To make it even more beneficial, I believe that this approach should be supplemented with tools for a more thorough use of process development results and knowledge. This would ensure that the maximum benefit was derived from investment into such a centre. Tools such as Excel do not necessarily include all the functionality to ensure a smooth development flow and the appropriate knowledge sharing and reuse in PV. A more formalised knowledge preserving infrastructure is what is required. It is also essential that the burgeoning PV industry improves in applying lessons learned from the semiconductor industry
s.menezes commented:
It’s about time someone realizes the importance of R
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