Solar Pioneer and Founder of Fraunhofer ISE Celebrates Birthday

“It’s been an exciting journey so far. I’m still amazed sometimes at how far we’ve already come with solar energy and I’m happy to still be around to enjoy the fruits of my labor.” This quotation from Prof. Dr. Adolf Goetzberger on being named European Inventor of the Year four years ago still holds true. On Nov. 29, 2013, the founder of the Fraunhofer ISE is celebrating his 85th birthday with family, colleagues from the institute and companions alike.

Although the European photovoltaics industry is currently experiencing a crisis, solar energy usage in the rest of the world has gained momentum. Dr. Goetzberger has played a crucial role in this development. In the late 1970s, he began to work tirelessly towards achieving his vision of establishing solar energy as a convincing alternative to fossil fuels. In 1981, he founded the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg under difficult conditions. With 1,300 employees, the institute is now the largest solar research institute in Europe.

“Adolf Goetzberger can look back on a lifetime of exceptional achievement,” says Prof. Dr. Eicke R. Weber, the current director of Fraunhofer ISE. “With his vision, he made an outstanding contribution to establishing solar energy as a fundamental building block of a sustainable energy supply, long before the energy transition made its way onto the political agenda.”

Dr. Goetzberger dedicated the first 25 years of his professional life to semiconductor technology and electronic devices. During the pioneering period of microelectronics, he worked at the most renowned research centers in the U.S.: five years in Palo Alto, CA, with Nobel Prize winner and co-inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, and another five years at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ.

In 1968, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft brought him back to Germany. Before founding Fraunhofer ISE, Adolf Goetzberger was director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF in Freiburg. In 1971, the University of Freiburg appointed him Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Physics. During his active working life, he supervised many degree candidates and doctoral students.

By the time Prof. Goetzberger retired in 1993, bowing out of his role as director of the Fraunhofer ISE, the institute had grown from just under 20 employees into the world’s second largest solar research institute, after the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the U.S. The institute has continued to thrive under his successors Prof. Joachim Luther, from 1993 to 2006, and Prof. Weber, since 2006. With around 1,300 employees at present, the institute is not only the second largest solar research institute in the world, but also the second largest institute within the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

In addition to his work at Fraunhofer ISE, Prof. Goetzberger has rendered outstanding services to important solar energy organizations. From 1991 to 1993, he was president of the International Solar Energy Society ISES, and between 1993 and 1997, president of the German Solar Energy Society DGS. He also played a considerable role in shaping and supporting conferences and symposiums – such as the symposiums in Bad Staffelstein on photovoltaic solar energy and solar thermal energy. In 2009, the organizers of the OTTI Symposium on solar thermal energy awarded the Spirit of Energy prize to Prof. Dr. Goetzberger, the OTTI’s honorary president, for his unwavering commitment – he shared the prize with the ISE’s deputy director at the time, Prof. Dr. Volker Wittwer.