Acknowledgements

This book would never had been possible without the continued support and the silent agreement from my wife Anneliese not to pursue her own career but to care for the family and guide two great kids, Tobias and Elisabeth, from birth through childhood and school into their adult age.

Only this allowed me to devote my time – not only during business hours – to growing a company (ASE – Applied Solar Energy) from scratch to one of the five largest cell and module producers in the early years of the new millennium. My thanks go out to all who supported me in those years, from colleagues and employees to shareholder individuals like Heinz-Werner Binzel, who believed in this new business and supported it in an environment where one would not always have expected it. My thanks go out to all customers who dared to buy the new products in those early days. Equally vital was the cooperation with machine builders and scientists, at which point I wish to highlight Prof. Rudolf Hezel from ISFH and Prof. Joachim Luther from the Fraunhofer-ISE.

At the same time, it was necessary to grow a market with the engagement of colleagues from other companies, who in the end turned out to become good friends, like Hubert Aulich, Tapio Alvesalo, Günther Cramer, Georg Salvamoser and many others in associations like BSW Solar and EPIA, who convinced and supported politicians in creating market support programs – the latter group is best represented by Hans-Josef Fell, to whom I am also grateful for the Foreword of this book. I also enjoyed the cooperation with other renewable associations which gave me the chance to get a better understanding of the other renewable technologies – this was a prerequisite for delving deeper into these products and into the important role which they play.

Not being a native speaker, I very much enjoyed how my German English was shaped into English English by Jenny Taylor. Last but not least it was Martin Scrivener who convinced me to put this information into a book after a plenary talk I gave in Chicago at the start of a big international scientific conference back in spring 2011(!) on this very subject. Had I known from the start how much pain it would take to bring this to a successful conclusion, I do not know whether I would have even started. But in the end I found it to be worthwhile and I thank Martin for his continued encouragement which helped me, together with the constructive comments from my students on the topics, to complete this book.