Hi. I'm the author of the original post. The amount of solar installed in the world is going to scale by more than 10x in the coming decades. There will be more than a trillion spent.

If you pick the winners, investment will have huge return.

Most solar companies, however, will be casualties in the fierce competition to come.

The other area to look at is energy storage. More renewables will increase the demand for energy storage. And it's early days in that field. Again: Huge returns for the winners. But most companies will be shaken out of the field.

Do you have any suggestions about good solar startups with good patents/tech/people?

The race to the bottom is more applicable to the panel manufacturers. The lowest cost producers are mostly Chinese companies, and the financial performance for these companies (ReneSola, Yingli Green Energy, Trina Solar, etc.) has been pretty terrible so far. Probably the best way to invest in solar through the stock market is to invest in a developer of solar projects. The best of these in my opinion in terms of scale and expertise is SunEdison (ticker: SUNE), and incidentally, the stock has been in free fall for various reasons over the past couple weeks, so this is probably a reasonable entry point.

It's a commodity manufacturing industry. It's going to have big turnover and thin margins. There's scope for innovation-driven cost reduction, but not for SV-style "unicorns".

There are going to be some huge companies thanks to solar. Those companies are also going to have big valuations, at least until the market is much more mature and saturated, but we're decades away from that.

As Ramez said, you don't bet on an "emerging industry", you bet on the winners in that emerging industry, otherwise you may very well lose your money. When new industries are born there are usually hundreds of competitors in the beginning, but eventually only a few big ones remain, and it's usually those that started early and got big early.