Changing world brings changed engineering demands

“In 10 years, 100% of all new capacity additions to electricity globally will come from zero-emission sources. We will not build any more bad stuff — it will be great stuff. Oil will still exist for the next 40, 50, 80 years, but you will see a concerted effort to offset oil within 10 years. And the reason for that is that it’s bankrupting us. In the U.S. today, we spend over $500 billion more for fuel than we did in 1999. This extra cost is an enormous headwind on our economy.

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‘We’re going to be focused entirely on adaptation and how we actually deal with the impacts of raping and pillaging our ecosystem. There’s a whole bunch of countries that are going to go fallow and have people starve to death. There’s going to be a whole bunch of countries that are going to have enormous shifts in the way their hydrology works, such that some places will get rain and some won’t. We’re going to literally have to change the way our economy works. It’s scary, but that’s the world we chose to live in.

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“[E]verything we install 10 years from now has already been invented. It’s not possible to do infrastructure at trillion-dollar scale unless the technology has had a minimum of 10 years of deployment experience. Everything is already in existence and is being piloted now.”

– Jigar Shah, founder of California-based SunEdison, and now partner of Injerjys, a $1-billion clean-tech fund, in an interview with Dawn Calleja, Report on Business Magazine, May 2013.