Everything They Tell You About Solar Is Wrong - Travis Bradford [View All]

Everything They Tell You About Solar Is Wrong - Travis Bradford

by: Hard Assets Investor posted on: August 15, 2008

Travis Bradford thinks that the solar energy industry is going to change the world ... and soon. The founder and president of the Prometheus Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating the deployment of sustainable technology, Bradford is author of Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry, which confidently predicts solar energy will become a dominate energy source over the next 10 years.

He spoke recently with the editors of HardAssetsInvestor.com.

HardAssetsInvestor.com (HAI): You say in your book that solar energy is going to change the way the energy industry works, and that it will become a dominant player in the field. It's such a niche player right now. What's going to change that?

Travis Bradford, founder and president, Prometheus Institute (Bradford): The thing that determines the energy choices we make are both the cost of generation and the cost of getting electricity from where it's made and to where it's needed. Solar is going to end up being cheaper in both regards.

By putting energy nearer to the point of use, solar is going to change the electricity network from a very centralized network - almost like a mainframe computer - to a very distributed network; more like wireless laptops, where a lot of the processing power is at the end of the network instead of in the middle. It has the ... ability to change the way the electricity architecture functions.

The economic and the system repercussions of that change are going to allow solar to become a dominant player in the energy architecture. In fact, it's the only technology that can do these things. Everything else is limited by the way the networks are built today.

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