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The Week in Germany: Business, Technology and the Environment August 3, 2007 Professor Sunshine Returns Home
It may at first glance seem rather unusual that a distinguished German professor looking for ways to better utilize solar energy would give up his position in the sunshine state at the University of California at Berkeley to move back home to comparatively damp and dark Germany. But a more thorough examination of the red-hot photovoltaic research taking place in Germany, a country that is home to many of the world's major solar energy firms, may help explain why it was rather easy after all for Eicke Weber to say "good-bye" to his job teaching materials physics in California, even after 23 years there, to take over the helm of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) in Freiburg last summer. "The conditions for research are for me much better here," Weber, 57, said in an interview with Germany's manager magazin recently. "In Berkeley I had a staff of 20 and a research budget of $1 million. Here it's a staff of 500 and a budget of € 30 million". The ISE was established more than 25 years ago in the Black Forest University town, which (to be fair) is actually proud of its claim to have more hours of sunshine each year than any other place in Germany - even if that total is far less than in California. But Weber said he was lured back home not by the southwestern German sunshine, but rather by the bright minds working feverishly on research to make photovoltaics more efficient, less expensive and ultimately more widely used. He is a man on a mission and Germany has a fertile climate for renewable energy. "Whether humanity will be able to avert a climate disaster will be determined over the course of the next 10 years," Weber said. Some of the most important scientific research on photovoltaic and the top discoveries for the solar industries have been coming out of Freiburg in recent years. Weber, who also took up the chair for applied physics and solar energy at the University of Freiburg, believes he can "help play a role in meeting the great challenge" at the ISE, which is at the vanguard of Germany's booming solar energy sector.
Weber, who evidently brought back home with him the sunny optimism and can-do American spirit, believes that solar energy can meet up to a fifth of Germany's energy needs within the coming decades - a daunting leap forward from the current level of 1.6 percent. Germany has a northern European climate marked by cool, damp winters and it can have long periods of abundant cloud cover at any time of the year. But it is the world's hottest country when it comes to "clean tech" renewable sources of energy, in particular solar power. Half of the world's biggest companies in solar energy - including Solarworld, Q-Cells and Conenergy - are in Germany and each year nearly one-third of all newly installed solar power capacity in the world goes on-line in Germany. No other country in the world is expanding the solar sector as rapidly as in Germany, where an attractive feed-in law helps to support the trend by offering a generous price for each kwh of electricity produced by renewable energies. The domestic production of solar cells in Germany is growing presently by 80 percent a year. An estimated 170,000 people in Germany are now working in renewable energy and by 2020 the number is projected to more than double to 500,000 - making it bigger than the Germany's giant car industry today. Weber believes that cutting the costs of photovoltaics is the key - which could lead to wider usage and make a contribution in the battle to slow or avert global warming. Because world market prices for high-grade silicon, an essential ingredient, has climbed ten-fold from 30 euros to a spot market price of 300 euros per kilo in recent years, Weber has developed a process to create energy by using less high-grade silicon known in the United States as "dirty silicon" - for significantly lower prices. The process has not yet worked on an industrial scale, but Weber is confident he and the ISE are on the right track. "It could be a quantum leap forward for solar power around the world,"
Weber said. (from the latest issue of Invest in Germany's magazine, available
at www.invest-in-germany.de/en/) Links: Freiburg: Germany's Greenest City (TWIG, July 27, 2007) Silicon Saxony (TWIG, July 20, 2007) Cloudy Germany a Powerhouse in Solar Energy (TWIG, May 11, 2007) |
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