Dead wrong . The rapid price reduction in PV has been enabled by governments around the world . In the U . K and Germany the government used policy instruments to create a market which enabled the Chinese to ramp up manufacturing of panels , inverters , brackets etc and enabled private firms to develop skills in installation . We installed 11 GWp in the UK . That wasn ' t because of the private sector . Without governments and climate protectionair pollution policies the western world would still run almost entirely on coal and barely a single MW of PV would ' ve been installed anywhere . The free market doesn ' t give a shit about externalities . The tragedy of the commons . I think we often lose sight of the boring long term vision of governments to develop and foster innovation and think of the bigger picture . The whole idea is often to create markets and then let the private sector take over and make it shiny and desirable . They ' re good at that . Funnily enough we struggle to get the private sector to invest in PV at all because paybacks are too long for typical business cycles . Business and the private sector for the most part think in 35 yr timescales . By their nature they can ' t think about long term problems . Lots of the installations here are being installed by Government institutions and housing . Also I ' m not going to get into amount of government money pumped into research . We ' ve got a massive new solar research centre just opened in my city . Really exciting stuff using perovskites . Their goal is to perfect the material and then essentially give it to the market for free for them to drive down the manufacturing cost . Some slick company will do that and people like you will give them the glory . Musk and Apple et al basically thrive on that and it makes me sad . Not to say Governments are perfect and don ' t create problems and distort markets . But especially in energy it ' s not as simple as Government badPrivate sector good