On a Tuesday night in early April, in a dining room on the 27th floor of the Mumbai home of Asia’s wealthiest man, Mukesh Ambani, a dinner is being held for about 20 people to mark the founding of his green power venture, New Energy.
Green does not look much like an international mega rock star. He has an elegant presence, long and thin, and is given to wearing smart and sensible slacks and sweaters. His hair is all there and not all grey, unusual for a man in his mid-70s. He speaks in a gentle sort of baritone and seems like the kind of man who hasn’t had to raise his voice much.
“There’s hardly a solar panel being installed in the world that does not include some of his technology.”That public profile could all change if Green were to win a Nobel Prize, which is not inconceivable given he’s been nominated for one in the past, and considering the stature of the awards he’s recently won.weird way, it was former US president Richard Nixon who supercharged Martin Green’s career.
mistress and a house-parent in a home for intellectually impaired boys. Money was tight; when Green started playing rugby he used thick cardboard salvaged from printing paper boxes as shin pads. “You really needed them, scrums were hotly contested back then, not the shams they are now,” he says. By 1974, Green was back in Australia, lecturing students at UNSW in microelectronics and continuing his own work on improving photovoltaic cells. Despite being an unknown specialist in an obscure field with no funding, laboratory or staff, he set out to beat NASA’s efforts to ramp up the power output of solar cells. He borrowed a spare room from the head of the school of electrical engineering and took on his first PhD student, Bruce Godfrey.
When the team believed they had a record-breaking cell, he would package it up in foam and bubble-wrap and send it to the US Solar Energy Research Institute in Colorado for verification. “I would wait a few days then sit at the kitchen bench early in the morning to call and get the numbers,” says Green. “It was exciting. We could never be sure what they would measure, since by then our testing was better than theirs.
Shi Zhengrong was a Chinese student in search of a job in 1989, before becoming Green’s 12th PhD student. He became the world’s first solar billionaire.At the time, Germany was determined to begin decarbonising its economy and introduced the world’s first effective feed-in tariffs to subsidise the deployment of solar cells. Finally, all the ingredients were in place for mass solar production.