The result of this Conference will be that the participant have widened their horizons, learned new facts, and used the opportunity for accumulating business contacts. The IEA would like to achieve something more.

This was the challenge laid down by Hanns-Joachim Neef, Head of the IEA's Energy Technology Collaboration Division in his concluding remarks to the third IEA Executive Conference on PV Power Systems, which took place in Venice, Italy on 3-5 November 1999. More than 160 senior executives drawn from PV industry, utilities, finance, NGOs and government were invited to the conference, Il Valore del Sole (The Value of the Sun), to address the challenges and opportunities facing PV technology in meeting the needs of rapidly changing energy markets. During the keynote presentations and the break-out discussion sessions, Kyoto Protocol climate change commitments emerged as one of the main strategic drivers for PV business development in the short term, but participants were keen to look beyond 2010 to the transition of solar electricity from niche to broad-based energy markets. Mr. Neef noted that the amount of investment, and the scale of technical, political and financial capacity needed to achieve breakthroughs, will require targeted and determined international co-operation.
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Erik Lysen, Chairman of IEA  PVPS, in his summation of the conference discussions, set out the key roles for each of the stakeholder groups in this collaborative effort. For governments, the onus is on formulating clear, long-term policy targets, and on creating the legislative framework to achieve these, such as movement away from subsidies to tax-based incentives, continuing R,D&D funding and assisting education both of users and decision makers. The PV industry itselff must continue to reduce systems costs, whilst working with other stakeholders, such as the building sector and utilities, to develop products matched to market needs, while for utilities, easier grid-connection mechanisms were identified as a major aspect of their contribution to PV market enablements. Mr. Lysen also called for more widespread implementation of measures designed to assist the deployment of new PV generation capacity including utility rate-based incentives, and net-metering, and new financial products to assist PV purchases. The IEA is seen as the ideal agency to co-ordinate the various strands of the PV market development strategy, through its wide-reaching links to both the public and private sectors. Mr. Neef offered the IEA network as an 'honest broker' to develop an Action Plan for Photovoltaics and to assist in marshalling the institutional and financial resources needed for its implementation.
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Delegates emerged from the meeting buoyed by the positive discussions, and by important policy commitments announced during the conference, notably a draft EU directive on renewables in liberalized electricity markets, Japan's indication that the residential market will be subsidy-free in the near future, and a proposed national net-metering bill for the USA.
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Information
Further information is available from:

• Rick Sellars at the IEA
  Fax: +33 1 4057 6759
  and from the IEA website: http://www.iea.org/venice.

Action lines of proposed international framework for PV market growth

• Political action	Information exchange to evaluate market facilitating policies and market rules to identify Best practices for deploying PV technologies. Establish voluntary target for the deployment of PV technologies
• Legislative and Administrative Action	Develop common rules, standards, and procedures for grid interconnection, and for PV building integration.
• Financial and Fiscal Action	Identify viable combination of existing and/or new sources of financing to ensure market growth meeting the proposed voluntary targets for grid-connected PV electricity.
• Private/Public Partnership Action	Industry and the public sector to work together to conceive new and improved PV projects and to secure the required investments.
• Information, Education, Training	Widespread dissemination, notably via the Internet and press, to publicize progress on these action lines.

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