Morphizm Goes Nanosolar

Let me translate the catchy title of this post thusly: Morphizm IT guru Riz sent me this Business 2.0 clip from CNN on the hotshit development of the solar industry, which was co-written by none other than Morphizm's contributing smartass Tom McNichol. It's a small world after all, and evidently it will be easier to energize than ever once solar goes global. Power up!

Lighting Up the $1 Trillion Power Market
[by Tom McNichol and Michael V. Copeland]
"Silicon Valley has changed the world once. Now, thanks to a wave of investment and innovation in solar power, it's on to the next revolution: a massive disruption of the U.S. electricity market..." MORE

As a person who will be moving out of an apartment and into a house soon, I'm already hatching plans to make the switch, pardon the obvious pun, provided the cost-benefit analysis works out to the satisfaction of all parties involved. The future is now, as always. David Byrne sang about it in "Once in a Lifetime."

The Riz continues with the science, with a clip on Nanosolar, who he calls "the leading light in this space, with $100 million in funding and incentives, including initial seed funding from the founders of Google four years ago. They are building the largest solar cell factory in the US as we speak in the Bay Area:"

Nanosolar Set for Expected Clean-Tech Boom
"We can achieve a cost reduction that will ultimately enable us to deliver grid-parity solar power, so that solar electricity does not cost more than power from the electricity grid...There's been two currencies on the planet and we may have a third: the first one is the price of money, the second one is the price of oil, and the third one, the 21st century currency, may be the price of carbon..." MORE

And in the spirit of opensourcing the MorphBlog, I'll let The Riz have the last word. Since he's the guy who comes and wires Camp Morphizm back together every time it falls apart, he's always made sense to me:

"Great news, as oil's stranglehold on energy price/performance and therefore the laws of thermodynamics will soon be shattered forever. In turn, that will corrode the power bases of the military-industrial complex, since the fundamental well they are all drinking from will dry up like everything else on the Arabian Peninsula. No $$$ = no incentive to start wars, period. Our arms-dealer/oil-baron leaders will continue to try and control things with their private backroom OPEC/CIA/NSA/Mossad/Pakistani-ISI/MI5&6 intelligence dealings. But, with the promise of ever-cheaper homegrown energy, the motivations for war will become increasingly transparent and their partners will drop out one by one as the money at the end of the war rainbow drops initially from trillions to billions, and hopefully soon to just millions. Not even the Bushes would risk a war with Halliburton as the only beneficiary. After all, they want their share too. How appropriate that both of the evil monopolies controlled by the Bush clan, information and oil, will ultimately be destroyed by American high technology innovation. The first was dealt a crippling blow by the internet, and the second will be utterly annihilated by solar power. R.I.P. OPEC and friends, may we never see your likes again. Long live Silicon Valley, bringer of hope."

Amen to that. For those of you looking for more of Morphizm's riotous Tom McNichol, click below for the good shit. He's killer.

Bin Laden Diary
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Here comes the sun. Is it going to be all right?