Cherry hill revisited—a retrospective on the creation of a national plan for photovoltaic conversion of solar energy for terrestrial applications

Innovation, Technology Development and Transfer

“…a breakthrough at a corporate laboratory in the USA in 1954 that made a commercially available PV device available and led to the first substantial orders, by the US Navy in 1957 (Ohl 1946;Gertner 2013); iii. a government R&D and public procurement effort in the 1970s in the USA, that enlisted skilled scientists and engineers into the effort and stimulated the first commercial production lines (Christensen 1985;Blieden 1999;Laird 2001); iv. Japanese electronic conglomerates, with experience in semiconductors, serving niche markets in the 1980s and in 1994 launching the world's first major rooftop subsidy programme, with a declining rebate schedule, and demonstrating there was substantial consumer demand for PV (Kimura and Suzuki 2006); v. Germany passing a feed-in tariff in 2000 that quadrupled the market for PV, catalysing development of PV-specific production equipment that automated and scaled PV manufacturing (RESA 2001; Lauber and Jacobsson 2016); vi.…”