Solar Together: A Proposal

DESCRIPTION: National governments spend more than $10 billion per year on clean energy R&D. These amounts will grow significantly under Mission Innovation, an initiative to double clean energy R&D budgets in five years launched by 20 countries at the opening of the Paris climate conference in November 2015. This new funding could help significantly to cut carbon emissions and energy poverty, although more money alone will not necessarily deliver better results. To realize the full promise of Mission Innovation, research spending must be well targeted and research results must find their way to market.

In this paper, Center Inaugural Fellow David Sandalow and co-author Colin McCormick review the solar PV R&D programs in four countries (the United States, Japan, Germany and South Korea) and propose a new program -- Solar Together -- to improve national solar R&D programs and speed commercialization of their research results.