“I will get much more excited when PV solar is in demand from efficiency increases and time to recoup cost than I will from government subsidy. …”
You might find the following account of Stanford Ovshinsky to be quite interesting:
en Wikipedia org/wiki/Stanford_Ovshinsky (replace spaces with a period to access)
Ovshinsky was a self-taught scientist, who had no formal training, and as such was devoid of the hide-bound strictures of academia. Many of his inventions, including those in the area of solar energy, went against the prevailing attempts to improve PV output by new discoveries in crystalline structures with PV characteristics.
Ovshinsky, on the other hand, investigated amorphous structures with PV output. He was unable to get any US companies interested in his ideas on photovoltaics. Sharp in Japan introduced his PV cells into hand-held calculators. These cells were produced in a continuous manner, much the way shrink-wrap and similar roll materials are made. There has been no recent follow-up on his company, Energy Conversion Devices which developed NiMH batteries. General Motors was to have built a plant in Ohio to produce NiMH batteries for their early electric vehicle, initially called the Impact (?), which then acquired a name change to the EV-1. All were destroyed when GM recalled the leased vehicles in another government boondoggle to throw taxpayer money into the “green” energy field.