[angleofrepose]

Sure, that makes sense. This is where I'm coming from with my interest in history:

I heard an interesting argument somewhere that solar cells are an ideal manufactured good. Whether you are building a module for a calculator or a GW scale plant, the modules are the same. This is fundamentally different for steam turbines. On the "concrete-internal combustion engine" spectrum of complexity, solar modules are closer to concrete and turbines are closer to ICEs.

Shouldn't this have led to a special interest in advancing solar module research? Or widespread understanding that eventually the unique set of attributes that define a solar module would lead to it's takeover of a significant portion of global energy generation? Shouldn't that have been apparent from the earliest days of photovoltaic research as a sort of philosophical truth before the advances in material science, extraction or manufacturing of the last fifty years?