One of the surprising attributes of solar’s evolution is that it still uses the same material and general design of the technology from 1954. Crystallized silicon has maintained over a 90% share of PV production, despite a wide array of different materials and configurations. The concept from the innovation literature on “dominant designs” provides another insight on why solar has been so successful (Suarez and Utterback, 1995). The idea is that technologies are amenable to scale up once a dominant design is established, which is defined as “stable core components that can be stable interfaces” (Murmann and Frenken, 2005). Solar’s overall design has been remarkably stable—in part since 1954 and especially since 1985— despite the emergence of many competing materials, designs, and combinations with at least some attributes that are superior. Repeatedly, silicon has held off competitors—even in the 2007–08 period when silicon prices spiked. The continued room for improvement, when so many times it has been declared a dead-end, echoes the Moore’s Law in computing (Farmer and Lafond, 2016). Silicon-based microchips have similarly induced hand-wringing about the end of 50 years of increases in the density of processing power, but which still has not arrived (Nagy et al., 2011). Leading companies in Japan, Germany, and the US lost their solar business in part by investing in alternatives Nemet, Gregory F.. How Solar Energy Became Cheap (p. 46).
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