To Catch the Sun is a book that explains how you can set up solar photovoltaic systems for yourself. It focuses on small-scale applications of low-cost systems. The first half of the book is made up of stories meant to inspire readers as it talks about communities all over the world building their own systems, often with very little technical background. The second part of the book is more technical and walks readers through exactly how to build such systems. This book has been made open access by the authors – so you can download a pdf for free from academia, although the hard copies are available from conventional book sellers.
Review
To Catch the Sun, is a non-fiction book written by two academics: Lonny Grafman and Joshua Pearce. Lonny is the founder of Appropedia, the largest wiki website devoted to appropriate technology, and a professor in California. Joshua is a chaired professor in Canada, whose research in photovoltaic systems is well known. Together they wrote this book in what seems like the Appropedia style – they want people to learn from the text, copy the designs, and make solar photovoltaic systems to meet their own needs.
As the first part of the book makes clear, Lonny has traveled all over the world setting up community solar systems and the first part of the book mostly relates his stories doing this. These stories are often funny. I won’t spoil any of them, but there are some that at first look are absolutely crazy solar system designs (e.g., a photovoltaic panel with a cage on it that would clearly block sunlight), which make sense once you understand the context. These stories go to the heart of the challenges 1st world people often encounter in trying to help people in the developing world. Often something you would never do in the US, is the absolutely smartest thing to do in a developing community and vice versa. Anyone in the Peace Corps or similar outfits would really benefit from reading these sections to see how to work with a community appropriately, with some humility and humor.
After the stories the book discusses the background you need in solar photovoltaics (devices that turn sunlight directly into electricity) to make your own system. These explanations – although introducing a lot of vocabulary — are understandable even if you have no technical background. If you are an engineer there is not anything new here – it is the type of summary you would expect in any introductory solar energy book. They do, however, provide lots of examples and make even complicated topics easy to understand (e.g., they explained physics semiconductor band theory using children on a slide). For readers already familiar with the topic this is a bit redundant, but I can see how it could help those that are not already familiar with it.
Then the do-it-yourself sections are the heart of the book. They have spreadsheets and easily step-by-step calculations on how to do the design of a solar system. Then there are many diagrams on how to wire it and pictures of what all the components look like. Everyone could build a system this way – which is I think the goal of the book.
They also claim that doing DIY solar can cut the costs by 50%, which seems credible when you compare the costs of materials to the final cost of a solar system installed by a professional. To do this, however, you are not calculating your own time costs. Would you rather save money on the system and do it yourself and spend your own time, or have professionals essentially charge you 2X the cost of materials to put it in for you? That is a question the readers need to answer for themselves, but the authors seem to assume everyone would rather do it themselves. I am skeptical.
Criticisms
To Catch the Sun mostly focuses on the electrical part of the design of photovoltaic systems, which although this is the most important part, I would have liked to see more options for the mechanical systems. They point out that the racking often costs the most – but only have a few examples. The book would be better with lots of low-cost racking systems done in as much detail as they did for the electrical systems – or maybe this could be their next book.
They primarily focus on DC off-grid systems, which is fine, but the majority of systems now are AC on grid and they could have covered this in more detail. They also did not really cover any of the regulatory issues involved with solar.
Lastly, they pointed out that DIY solar was likely to be less expensive than grid power or diesel generator power if off grid, but they did not cover the logical ramifications of scaling. What if everyone did this and put in their own low-cost solar system? DIY solar could completely undercut the fossil-fuel electricity market. They didn’t talk about any of the negatives of this. What about all the sunk costs for fossil fuel infrastructure? Who is going to pay for that?
Conclusions
Overall, To Catch the Sun is a good book as an introduction to DIY solar photovoltaic systems. You can read this book in a Saturday afternoon and have enough confidence for building a small system if you follow their instructions. If you just want to build a system you can skip to the second part -and if you just want to learn how to set up community systems, you can just read the first part. It was good at what it for, but the To Catch the Sun book left me with many questions as it did not cover any of the social ramifications of mass use of DIY solar, e.g., large-scale fossil fuel worker unemployment.
