Japan's New National R&D Program for Photovoltaics

The New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) will start two new national R&D programs for photovoltaics in fiscal year (FY) 2006: "R&D for Next Generation PV Systems" and "PV System Technology for Mass Deployment, Phase II". The duration of these new programs is four-years. These programs have been created with reference to PV Roadmap Toward 2030 (PV2030), which was established in 2004 with the aim of providing a long-term perspective of PV R&D in Japan. We will briefly describe the outline of this roadmap and discuss NEDO's role, taking account of the fact that the PV market in Japan is rapidly expanding. The targets and details of these new R&D programs will also be shown