From Space to Earth

"This is a beautiful book. It’s everything an introduction to a subject should be. It’s structured in a very intelligent way; it has short chapters; it has a lot of good illustrations. It’s based on a lot of firsthand interviewing and research. Solar cells were invented in 1954, but for the first 20 years they were only used for one thing: powering satellites. It was only around the time of the oil crisis that people started to think about what you could do on earth with these solar cells – hence the title of the book: From Space to Earth . Pretty much all of the early applications of solar cells were ‘off-grid’. You had a remote application that couldn’t be connected to the electricity grid, and therefore it was wonderful to have a source of electricity on-site. The microwave repeater stations in places like Papua New Guinea were a classic example. You’re trying to get a telephone line over a mountain range that is completely covered in trees, and the only way to do that is to install repeater stations that carry the signal. If you do it the traditional way, you have to use diesel fuel, which means you have to hire a helicopter every month to take the fuel to refill the generators. Another group of customers for early solar panels were the marijuana growers in Humboldt and Mendocino counties in California. They like living in remote places, so were off the grid and didn’t have conventional electricity supplies. Solar was the way they got their ordinary electricity. It goes up to the mid-1990s, so is a good complement to my own book, which takes you up the present. Perlin’s book is a history of the first 40 years of solar, when it was used almost entirely for off-grid applications. My book is about on-grid – things that you plug into the electricity grid."