Solar photovoltaics innovation

Gregory Nemet

Chapter 20 in Handbook of Energy Innovation, 2026, pp 377-387 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Innovation in solar photovoltaics (PV) provides an important case study to inform the broader literature on innovation in part because of the extent of cost reductions over the past seven decades as well as the more recent growth in adoption, such that solar now accounts for approximately 9 percent of global electricity production. There are clear mechanistic and bidirectional linkages between cost reductions and adoption of PV technology. Thus, the learning curve model is used to describe the process of innovation for PV, and indeed this is well justified due to the high goodness of fit and nearly constant learning rate over many years. But a deeper look at the drivers of change for PV over its entire history provides additional insight for innovation studies. First, the cost of solar electricity has fallen by factor of 10,000 since the 1950s. No one country did this; each contributed distinct capabilities and built on others, enabled by global knowledge flows. In short: the United States created the technology, Germany built a market and China made it cheap. PV improved via a combination of public support for PV technology, relatively free flow of knowledge globally and growth in demand that has been robust to electoral and business cycles.

Keywords: Solar; PV; Innovation; Learning Curves; Niches; Modularity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035310401
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