background preloader

Solar References

Facebook Twitter

Ray Kurzweil. Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (/ˈkɜrzwaɪl/ KURZ-wyl; born February 12, 1948) is an American author, computer scientist, inventor, futurist, and is a director of engineering at Google.

Ray Kurzweil

Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, as has been displayed in his vast collection of public talks, wherein he has shared his primarily optimistic outlooks on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

Life, inventions, and business career[edit] Early life[edit] Ray Kurzweil grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. Kurzweil attended Martin Van Buren High School. Mid-life[edit] Later life[edit] Personal life[edit] Empire of the Sun. MARTIN GREEN HAS BEEN GOING to solar conferences for more than 30 years.

Empire of the Sun

But Solar Power 2006, held in October of that year in San José, at the southern end of California’s Silicon Valley, was something new. “This year there were about 6,000 attendees, compared with 1,000 last year,” says Green who, as director of the Photovoltaics Centre of Excellence at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), in Australia, was a keynote speaker. “It was all investment bankers and the like, the kind of people we haven’t seen at these conferences before.” The money men were drawn by solar power’s recent stellar performance. From 2000 through 2005, sales of solar panels soared at a compound annual growth rate of 41 per cent, according to Paula Mints, who tracks the solar industry for California-based Navigant Consulting. In 2005 alone, the solar power sector grew 44 per cent in volume, 50 per cent in revenue and a whopping 149 per cent in profit.

No doubt about it: solar power is hot. Indias panel price crash could spark solar revolution - environment - 02... Solar gets cheap fast. Cross-posted from Climate Progress. There’s a joke in the solar industry about when “grid parity” — the time when solar becomes as cheap as fossil sources — will happen. Ron Kenedi, the former VP in Sharp Solar’s U.S. business liked to throw out random dates, telling me once “November 21, 2012″ in jest. The truth is, it will happen in phases — one market and one technology at a time. But according to two top solar executives — Tom Dinwoodie, chief technology officer and founder of SunPower and Dan Shugar, former president of SunPower and current CEO of Solaria — “ferocious cost reductions” are accelerating that crossover in a variety of markets today.

Dinwoodie and Shugar are responsible for developing over $3 billion in photovoltaic (PV) projects around the world. Their goal: to explain that solar PV is no longer a fringe, cost-prohibitive technology — but, rather, a near-commodity that is quickly becoming competitive with new nuclear, new natural gas, and, soon, new coal. Make solar energy economical. As a source of energy, nothing matches the sun.

Make solar energy economical

It out-powers anything that human technology could ever produce. Only a small fraction of the sun’s power output strikes the Earth, but even that provides 10,000 times as much as all the commercial energy that humans use on the planet. Why is solar energy important? Already, the sun’s contribution to human energy needs is substantial — worldwide, solar electricity generation is a growing, multibillion dollar industry. But solar’s share of the total energy market remains rather small, well below 1 percent of total energy consumption, compared with roughly 85 percent from oil, natural gas, and coal. Those fossil fuels cannot remain the dominant sources of energy forever. For a long-term, sustainable energy source, solar power offers an attractive alternative. Many of the technologies to address these issues are already in hand. How efficient is solar energy technology?

Prospects for improving solar efficiency are promising. References DOE (U.S.