Munich/Freiburg (dpa) – The German solar pioneer Adolf Goetzberger is dead. In 1981 he founded the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) in Freiburg. The Munich-born researcher died on February 24 at the age of 94, as the ISE announced on Wednesday.
The EU Commission and the European Patent Office once described the German physics professor as the “sun god”. In 2009 he was honored in Prague as “European Inventor of the Year” for his life’s work.
“I’m often asked how I came across solar energy, which was not taken seriously as an energy source at the time,” Goetzberger wrote in a 2018 review of his life. His answer: “I was particularly fascinated by the Club of Rome’s study on the ‘Limits to Growth’. It seemed clear to me that since fossil fuel resources are finite, an inexhaustible source of energy like the sun could not be ignored .”
Goetzberger received his doctorate after studying experimental physics in 1955 at the University of Munich. He then worked with Nobel Prize winner and co-inventor of the transistor William Shockley in Palo Alto, California. In 1968 he returned to Germany and took over the management of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF.
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