Selling Solar - The Diffusion of Renewable Energy in Emerging Markets

To solve the climate crisis, the world must make a wholesale shift to renewable energy technologies. With surging growth in emerging markets, this transformation takes on even greater urgency. The challenges - and opportunities - are immense.

Selling Solar considers how such a shift might happen. Focusing on the case of solar photovoltaics, it shows how, at the start of the 21st century, this promising technology began to diffuse rapidly in select emerging markets, after years of struggling to take off. What were the initial barriers to diffusion? How were they overcome? Who did it? And how can this success be replicated?

Drawing on literature on innovation diffusion and entrepreneurship, the author answers these questions, showing how entrepreneurs affected profound technological change not just through the solar systems they sold, but through the example they set to both new market entrants and policymakers. In analysing how this happened, this book offers important lessons for the diffusion of a range of renewable energy technologies in emerging markets, and for the advancement of the sector as a whole. Selling Solar is essential reading for anyone who believes in a renewable energy future and wants it sooner rather than later.


'Selling Solar sheds light on the failures, successes, lessons learned and best-practice in the history of solar innovation diffusion in emerging market economies. Its analyses and sound recommendations, deriving from the author's long practice in this field, will provide a practical guideline in the future.'
Hermann Scheer, General Chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy and President of EUROSOLAR


'An extremely useful publication which provides a very valuable assessment of how solar energy can be harnessed on a large scale using market approaches.'
R. K. Pachauri, Director General, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), and Chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)


'Selling Solar is for everyone in the business of solar and solar support ... the solar trip of a lifetime from an expert who has experienced it all.'
Photon International


'This book moves way beyond the headlines and explores the current and future of an exciting and dynamic industry.'
Daniel Kammen, Professor, University of California Berkeley, Founding Director, Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory


'With a combination of entrepreneurial vision, persistence and policy innovation, Damian believes that the world can ignite a market for solar that always existed and was just waiting to happen.'
Judge Business School, University of Cambridge


'There are books that inform, those that instruct, and those that inspire - Selling Solar does it all, and manages to be an absorbing and entertaining read at the same time.'
Green Energy


'A report from the front line of entrepreneurial enterprise.'
International Journal of Ambient Energy