April 24, 2026 by K. W. Wesselink-Schram, University of Twente
Collected at: https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-solar-climate.html
Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975. Management looked at it, decided film was doing fine, and put the technology in a drawer. By the time they took it seriously, other companies had taken the market. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Solar is winning on every metric. According to an international coalition led from the University of Twente, that’s exactly why the research behind it is in trouble.
A finished problem
A new paper published in Progress in Photovoltaics argues that solar energy is heading for its Kodak moment. It is authored by 15 researchers at 11 institutions on four continents, led by Rebecca Saive of UT’s MESA+ Institute. It is a coalition statement in the field’s main journal, warning that solar has become so visibly successful that funders, students, and policymakers now treat it as a finished problem.
The evidence is concrete. Conference attendance for fundamental solar research is dropping outside the perovskite community. Students who would have started a Ph.D. in solar a decade ago are going into quantum technology instead.
The argument nobody wants to make
For 30 years, climate has been the main case for solar. Saive and her co-authors want the solar community to stop leading with it. Instead, solar researchers should replace it with themes like economic competitiveness, national resilience, and energy independence. They point to Ukraine, where decentralized solar generation cut recovery time after infrastructure attacks to 3–6 hours, compared with 12–18 hours for centralized supply.
The obvious objection is that this concedes too much. If climate scientists stop making the climate argument, who will? Dropping the frame risks legitimizing the politics that forced the retreat in the first place.
Saive answers that the argument was already failing with the people who matter. Funders and policymakers who are unmoved by climate urgency will not be convinced by more of the same. Resilience and economic strength give those audiences a reason to care that actually works for them. Climate stays in the picture. It just stops being the opening line.
The talent we are about to lose
The funding argument sits atop a workforce argument. Saive warns, “We don’t want a society that does not possess the workforce to understand and operate existing technology, let alone advance technology to the next needed level.” The paper uses Germany’s nuclear phase-out as the example. Once the skilled people move on, restarting is much harder than shutting down.
For a Dutch reader, this is not a distant warning. The Netherlands is already missing energy transition targets, partly due to a lack of trained people. The coalition’s point is that letting basic solar research wither now sets up the same problem, a generation later, in the technology the country is betting on. As Saive puts it, basic research is how we “train the talent to understand, operate and advance our energy system.”
More information
Rebecca Saive et al, The Need for Fundamental Photovoltaics Research to Ensure Energy Security, Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications (2026). DOI: 10.1002/pip.70105
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