As solar energy continues its exponential growth, what lies ahead for the technology?
Solar panels have gone mainstream. The price of photovoltaic modules has fallen by 99% over the last four decades, driven by smart public policy and efficiency gains.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, billionaire co-founder of Netscape and prominent angel investor Marc Andreessen penned a viral letter titled “It’s Time To Build”. In the piece, Andreessen pins America’s failure to adequately respond to the virus on the country’s inability to build infrastructure in the real world, including hospitals, housing, manufacturing, transportation, and energy. To address climate change, he proposes the construction of a few thousand nuclear power plants around the world. He’s not alone in his ambition. Nuclear energy has a lot of fans in Silicon Valley, drawn to its promises of harnessing the ingenuity…
In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report on the climatic impacts of meeting and exceeding an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels. The findings of what we could face by 2040 were dire. Agricultural collapse. Destruction of all coral reefs. Inundated coastlines. Millions of climate refugees. That’s at 1.5 degrees of warming. With the policies currently in place, the world is expected to warm by at least 2.8 degrees Celsius by 2050.
McKinsey and Company, the global management consulting firm, has a new report out on what it will take to limit…
