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 twenty-first 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 analyzing 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.