Today we have held successfully the second General Assembly of the European Photovoltaic Technology Platform.

The focal points of our meeting were:

The presentation of the recent results of the four working groups of our platform on Policy and Instruments, Information Promotion, Education and Market Deployment, Science, Technology and Application and Developing Countries as well as the highly interesting reports and contributions on programs for national market introduction and R&D, Regional development, Financing issues and the interrelation between different EU Technology Platforms.

The highlight of our General Assembly was, without any doubt, the presentation of the final version of the

“Strategic Research Agenda for Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conversion”.

I would like to thank especially Prof Wim Sinke - the working group leader - and the other working group members as well as the many contributors in the background for their really excellent work.

For the first time in Europe we have a Strategic Research Agenda that has been consolidated Europe-wide between the main actors in PV Technology. That is: industry, science and technology and stakeholders in the political sector. This Agenda constitutes an excellent basis for the further development of European, national, and regional strategies on industrial activities, market development as well as on research and innovation in photovoltaics.

On a global scale a comparable consolidated agenda exists - as I see it - only in Japan. Europe and Japan are leading the PV business not only with respect to industrial activities but also with respect to the strategic line-up.

Of course a strategy has to be transformed into practice. For this, the European Commission, the national governments, European industry, the financial sector and research and development need to take concerted and well-tuned action. Thus, further challenges lie in front of us.

From the position of research and development, it is essential that the budgets for science and innovation grow according to - I am not saying proportionally to - the growth of the industrial sector. Cost reduction in solar electricity generation will be achieved in due time only when both highly innovative mass production and massive targeted efforts in Science and Technology are undertaken.
Do this we need an increase by a factor of two of R&D budgets until 2010.

As a person from the R&D sector I would like to stress especially that we need a well-balanced strategy between short-term, medium-term and long-term research - as pointed out in the Strategic Research Agenda. There is a comprehensible risk that too less focus is put on novel technologies we need in the next decade in order to further reduce the cost of photovoltaic and to transform our energy systems towards sustainability.

This statement is not in contradiction to the fact that today most important is market growth - an exponential market growth I should say. Without such a sustainable market growth in photovoltaics, there can be

• no sustainable energy system in due time,
• no industrial leadership in Europe on photovoltaics,
• no basis for a steadily growing intellectual capacity on photovoltaics in Europe.

Photovoltaic markets have to be fostered in and throughout all European countries - not just in a few forerunner states. Sometimes appropriate laws have been passed by central national governments but bureaucracy still stands in the way and must be adapted to support such progressive laws. Further, on a European scale it is not sustainable on the long-term those countries without dedicated market introduction schemes for photovoltaics concentrate on industrial activities for export only. Feed in tariffs in all European countries are essential.

Once again: we need strongly growing markets all over Europe and worldwide to drive down the learning curve for photovoltaic installations and thus to swiftly reduce the costs of solar electricity.

The Strategic Research Agenda of our technology platform and
the ideas on market deployment, education, information promotion, policy instruments, financial instruments, the co-operation in Europe and the application of photovoltaics in developing countries presented today
will support this process of massive photovoltaic deployment worldwide in the most effective way.

Joachim Luther