The infrastructure path to a sustainable world market for photovoltaics

As the markets for photovoltaics grow and become more main stream, customers and financing institutions will increasingly require assurances of design, installation, and maintenance competency and professionalism. This can either evolve as a large number of uncoordinated and dissimilar local and regional regulations, or may be developed within a common framework that ensures quality, continuity, and transportability reducing the ultimate burden of compliance on designers and installers. This paper is a summary of the issues confronting efforts to develop industry standards, current efforts to develop global standards for systems hardware and training, and projections for the phased development of these quality programs for the photovoltaics industry. The paper also discusses the impact of such a standardization program on access to financing and the impact on the creation of local, sustainable jobs.