Australia’s top carbon cutters: solar pioneer Martin Green

This excerpt is from Crikey‘s profiles of the top 10 “carbon cutters” in Australia – those wielding most influence in the development of policies, technologies and projects that will help lower the country’s greenhouse emissions. Solar pioneer Martin Green is listed at #8.

When Martin Green got hooked on solar power 40 years ago, it was mainly used to fuel spacecraft. Few were interested except for NASA, and it cost $50,000 (in 1974 dollars no less) to fit out a house with a glittering solar array.

As a PhD student, Green saw what most didn’t: the extraordinary potential of using the sun to generate electricity.

The technology was already quite mature, he thought back then. Solar could provide on-the-spot energy without fossil fuel imports (climate change was not such an issue). Millions of poor people could use it. It was 1974 and Green was sold.

“Solar energy just seemed like a sensible way of generating electricity,” Green told The Power Index. ”It was something that always seemed feasible but way off in the future.”

Fast forward four decades and Green has done more than just about anyone else to put affordable solar panels on rooftops from Geelong to Guangzhou. This engineer set up – and still co-runs – a solar school which has trained more than 500 engineers (600 more are currently enrolled). You may not have heard of the University of NSW’s School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy, but it probably designed parts of your neighbour’s solar panels.

It’s one of the world’s top three solar institutes, producing the world’s most efficient silicon solar cell under lab conditions and offering the world’s first undergraduate degree in PV engineering. Graduates have fanned the globe.

The school made its mark when it began to train Asian —   particularly Chinese — students. Following troubled ex-poster boy Shi Zhengrong, graduates turned the industry from expensive, developed-world manufacturing to cheaper Asian manufacturing. This precipitated the sustained solar price drop which explains why Australia now has 800,000 solar roofs.

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