The infrastructure path to a sustainable world market for photovoltaics

Abstract

As the markets for photovoltaics grow and become more main stream, customers ancl financing institutions will increasingly require assurances of design, installation, and maintenance competency ancl professionalism. This can either evolve as a large number of uncoordinated and dissimilar local and regional regulations, or may be developed within a common framework that ensures quality, continuity, and transportability, reducing the ultimate burden of compliance on designers and installers. This paper is a summary of the issues confronting efforts to develop industry standards, current efforts to develop global standards for systems hardware and training, and projections for the phased development of these quality programs for the photovoltaics industry. The paper also discusses the impact of such a standardization program on access to financing and the impact on the creation of local, sustainable jobs.

Status, Trends, Challenges and the Bright Future of Solar Electricity from Photovoltaics

“…Most of these installations were funded by some international aid agency. Reviews and follow-up studies of these programs have indicated very large failure rates, primarily due to lack of technical infrastructure [42], training, cultural misunderstandings, design of the payment structure, and other nontechnical reasons [43]. Rarely have the PV modules failed.…”