Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is rapidly emerging as a cost-effective option in the world economy. Governments, corporations, and grassroots actors are promoting solar PV power in the hope of transforming the fossil-based energy regime and mitigating climate change. However, reports about miserable working conditions, environmentally deleterious mineral extraction, and toxic waste dumps corrode the image of a problem-free future based on solar power. The research is contradictory and the environmental movement is divided. Meanwhile, few are asking fundamental questions about what solar PV technology is from the perspective of global inequalities and asymmetric resource flows in world trade. Building on insights from ecological economics and philosophy of technology, the book offers a novel interdisciplinary approach to understand the contradictory nature of solar PV technology. Its central question is whether ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ – an asymmetric transfer of labor time and natural resources – is a necessary condition for solar PV development. The findings demonstrate how large-scale development of solar PV technology may require global asymmetries as much as polysilicon, electrical components, engineers, or direct sunshine. To the extent that decisionmakers disregard this, it may be a symptom of ‘machine fetishism,’ which masks the global asymmetries of the emerging energy regime while also preventing us from grasping what modern technology ultimately is. This forces us to seriously consider to what degree a long-term sustainable relation to the biosphere can be reached through endless economic expansion, as implied in proposals for “green growth” or various “green technologies,” and to what degree it can only be reached by a progressive degrowth with attention to well-being, justice, and ecological limits. The book makes a strong case for the latter.