I left school early when teachers tried to prise my head open and pour algebra and fractal equations in, with the words of Mark Twain swilling around in my head.

It wasn’t until I became a tool maker and had to understand variation and probability in a practical sense that the penny dropped. Since then, I have developed a growing respect for data, mathematics and statistics as long as they have practical application and a healthy dose of the real world thrown in.

Now, I find myself buried in statistics as a photovoltaics (PV) industry analyst and researcher; and I have to admit, I get excited about data. When I used to work for a PV manufacturer, forecasting was part of my role, and I would spend far more time than I was supposed to trying to understand what had happened and more importantly, what might happen.

I remember trying to explain to blank faced friends at barbeques how incredibly excited I was to be working on a research project where we were studying people who hadn’t bought PV. We had all focused on trying to understand why people bought it instead of why people hadn’t bought it; and in doing so this opened up the world of the potential PV customer in my head.

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I have just finished a project – the Australian PV Market Forecast 2011-2015 – which is the third in an annual series that I have worked on.

Through this project I have learnt that two heads are better than one sometimes. For the last few years, I have worked on this project with Warwick Johnston Managing Director at SunWiz, because when we met, he challenged my data. We discussed and debated, and now collaborate as a better outcome is inevitable from two perspectives.

So we would bang heads, argue, debate, analyse and challenge each other and after months of work we reached our goal. We formed our views based on a combination of the best possible data, hard work in analysis and a good amount of real world experience, and as a result the potential for our market started to appear before our very eyes.

There were times, as the picture emerged, that we both literally sat on the edge of our seats babbling over the top of each other with excitement and anticipation at what we could see and more importantly, what it meant for the thousands of people we know who work in the PV industry and rely on it for a livelihood.

The Australian PV market is a hard place to operate; tough, unforgiving and just occasionally very generous. The next few years are likely, we predict, to bear witness to another transformation as the worlds of PV, electricity generation and carbon all collide.

What will that look like? Ah, that would be telling.