Dramatic forest fires in California, flooding in Mozambique, unusual heat waves in Europe, hurricanes of strength never seen before—the world’s climate is getting out of control. The list of human casualties and damage in billions of euros and dollars is getting longer day by day. Weather experts and climatologists make it clear that global carbon dioxide emissions are accelerating, and as a consequence, the world’s climate is becoming unpredictable.

This book, an updated edition of The Triumph of the Sun: The Energy of the New Century, is not another disaster report. It brings good news. It presents the details of a solar revolution that started with the dawn of the new century. The new solar energy conquered the markets and sidelined the conventional sources. Supplemented with the latest facts and figures, the book features new and updated sections on topics such as climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, carbon allowances and CO2 taxes, auto-consumption, and renewable energy for heat and transport. Energy being at the heart of economic development and everybody’s well-being, the new dominance of the renewables, which are the key to combating global change, revolutionized our society as a whole for the better. The author of the book witnessed the progress of this solar revolution and was one of the pioneers in the development of modern solar technologies.

Wolfgang Palz is a German physicist. For more than half a century, he has been a global leader of the development of solar energy and other renewables. As an official of the European Commission in Brussels, he was the manager of PV development in Europe for 20 years. From 2000 to 2002, he was a member of an "Enquête Commission" of the German Parliament on the German energy perspective on the horizon 2050. Later, he was a consultant for the EU Commission on PV programmes for the underprivileged in Latin America. Dr. Palz has received numerous awards, including the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) Global Leadership Award in Advancing Solar Energy Policy (2011). He is a bearer of an Order of Merit of the German Republic.