The solar PV industry has experienced rapid growth over the last few years. Japan, USA and Europe are engaged in a highly competitive race to capture a multi-billion dollar market. Without any specific action to encourage the introduction of solar, Europe is likely be left behind.

• In 1997, a 25% growth rate made this a record year of expansion for the global solar PV industry, now worth in excess of US $1 billion.

• Conservative forecasts predict that global annual sales will reach $8-18 billion by 2010.

• The 1996, European Commission report into solar energy pointed out that with a continuation of current growth rates, photovoltaics would be maintaining 453,000 jobs by 2010.

• According to the US Department of Energy, "Photovoltaics is a high technology which, as a domestic industry could create or support as many as 3,800 well paying jobs for every US $100 million of PV sales."

• The Japanese government plans to build 70,000 solar homes, installing 400MW of solar PV by the turn of the century and 4,600MW by 2010. Four of the main Japanese solar companies: Kyocera, Sharp, Sanyo and Mitsubishi, have announced plans to increase combined production to 210-240MW by the year 2000. This is more than a tenfold increase in domestic production over 1996.

• "We will work with businesses and communities to use the sun's energy to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels by installing solar panels on one million more roofs around our nation by 2010. Capturing the sun's warmth can help us to turn down the Earth's temperature." US President Clinton, UNGASS (the third UN summit on the state of the environment), June 1997. The US Government estimates that their Million Roofs program will create approximately 70,000 new high technology jobs by 2010.

A BP study shows that an investment of US$550 million into a 500 MW solar PV factory will reduce costs by 80%. It shows that the factory can be built utilising existing technologies and "subject to appropriate investment, there are no barriers to achieving 500MWp per annum production of photovoltaic modules using crystalline silicon". Industry analysis shows that cost reduction on this scale would generate an annual global market of at least US$100 billion

Each day, the sun pours 15,000 times more energy upon the earth than we generate ourselves from fossil and nuclear sources.

Photovoltaic (PV) systems are already a billion dollar business.

A PV cell is made from a sliver of silicon into which small quantities of other elements have been added.

These impurities are arranged to give it a net excess of electrons on one surface and net deficit of electrons on the other surfaces.

Since one side is more negatively charged than the other, an electric field is created.

Nothing moves under the action of this field until a particle of light, a photon, kicks an electron out of its place in the crystal of silicon.

The liberated electron can move and the space it leaves allows movement of electrons between the two sides of the wafer.

Thus a current flows through a circuit joining the two surfaces. The technology is very similar to that of transistors which drive almost all modern electronics. PV is developing all the time and economies of scale are having a constant impact, so PV systems continue to drop in price.