Learning lessons: Selling Solar

With the current rush of both people and money into the renewables sector, there will be huge opportunities – particularly for people to learn painful mistakes. Enthusiastic and well meaning people new to the field will often plough on without stopping to think and look around. What has worked well, what has worked less well?

There is an enormous amount of accumulated knowledge in the renewable energy field of things that work and things that don’t. All too often people are technology focused, and fail to get the basics of policy right, or fail to get economics that work for the people they are trying to get to take up their technology. Schemes fail not through technological shortcomings (though that can also happen), but more frequently through obvious system failures.

The adoption of solar electricity in developing countries is a classic case in point, with any number of well-intentioned (and often well-funded) schemes starting, getting going and then falling flat when what with hindsight are obvious mistakes get made. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and we now have plenty of it. A new book, Selling Solar, provides a wonderfully concise and well written account of many of these simple lessons, from the point of view of a successful solar entrepreneur. It is full of short, summary boxes with a sequence of sensible, bullet point conclusions. For instance, among the recommendations on policy guidelines are things like ‘Do not create parallel government-driven markets’ and ‘if there is no rural finance, do not do fee-for-service’.

These may seem like obvious lessons, but they are two mistakes that have frequently been made, and may well be made again. The danger is that, if they are made again, the rush into renewables is simply followed by a rush out of it. A little reading before the rush would greatly increase the chances of success.