I’ve just been reading that Toshiba’s entered the solar voltaic systems market. Very curious. The company reckons that by 2015, the market – this is actually for industrial plants and the utility market rather than panels for your roof – will be worth a cool 2.2 trillion yen. That’s US$24.4bn.
This had me thinking about another article I read in The Guardian about the dawn of wireless power. Rather than a bunch of cables and plugs, you would have a hub in a room that would induce power to all the appliances in need thereof, including laptops, radios, lamps and more besides. It seems, unsurprisingly that energy is going to be quite the buzzword for the next decade – not just from the point of view of oil vs the rest, but rather as a site for innovation, perhaps as the Web was (and really, continues to be) starting the end of the last century. I’ll be watching as long as there are working eyes lodged firmly in my eye sockets.