by Jeff Dorsch
“It’s been a very difficult time to be in the solar industry,” acknowledged James Brown, executive vice president of global business development at First Solar, in his Wednesday keynote address for the Intersolar North America conference.
Taking “Solar Power’s Transition from Subsidy Dependence to Mainstream Energy Solution” as his theme, Brown said this year has been marked by “a lot of pain” and “chaos” for those in the solar industry. “We had become over-reliant on the subsidies,” he noted, many of which are being reduced or eliminated by governments around the world. In this “false and protected environment,” the solar industry didn’t really have to compete with the fossil-fuel industry, and it now finds itself having to contend with a variety of energy sources, Brown said.
“The good news is it’s not all gloom and doom,” the First Solar executive asserted. There are “long-term opportunities” to be found, especially in the area of energy security, he added.
“Emerging and fast-growing economies need power quickly,” Brown said. “Solar is the best way to get power to the 1.5 billion to 2 billion people who don’t have access to power.”
He urged industry participants in the audience to “get those ideas off the whiteboard and into practice. Solar is becoming part of the energy mix. Our industry will likely need to go through a number of evolutions in the next few years.”
He closed with a quotation from Peter Drucker: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”