The Daily Sprout
Leading Silicon Producer to Double Production: Hemlock Semiconductor says that they will double their output of silicon this year for both semiconductors and solar in a $1.5 billion expansion – Cleantech.
DOE Expects More Wind than Coal: A new report form the U.S. Department of Energy enumerated 225 gigawatts of proposed wind projects, far more than all the coal and natural gas power plants in the pipeline – Wired.
$1 Per Watt Wind?: Dallas, Texas-based BroadStar Wind Energy came out of stealth at the WINDPOWER 2008 with a bold claim – their AeroCam Turbine can achieve $1 a watt, installed – Cleantech.
EDP Renovaveis Has $2.4 Billion IPO: The Portuguese utility EDP raised €1.57B (~$2.4B) in the IPO of its renewable energy arm – Clean Edge.
“The Future Is Now?”: Ray Kurzweil, one of the world’s most optimistic and credible futurists, sees a sunny future. Solar power will be cost competitive with fossil fuels in five years and in 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources, he claims. Make sure to check his graphs – NYTimes.
SF Solar Incentive Inches Toward Law: The full San Francisco board of supervisors voted today to pass the solar incentive program, but it will need a final reading next week when a competing, scaled back solar incentive proposal will also be voted on. So, still in limbo.
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil’s work. The book is “”My Stroke of Insight”" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor’s talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It’s spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I’m not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I’ve read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they’re making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven’t heard Dr Taylor’s TEDTalk, that’s an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it’s 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There’s a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best “”Fantastic Voyage”" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!