Our planet is blue because it’s full of clean air and delicious water. Other planets aren’t so lucky.
Good news: scientists found another blue planet!
Bad news: On that planet, it rains glass. All day, every day.
We think it’s pretty important to look after our own blue planet. There aren’t many like it.
Sungevity CEO Andrew Birch was just profiled by The Telegraph.
Growing up in Edinburgh, where his father managed a top hotel, Birch says he was always passionate about the environment. “I blame David Attenborough,” he says. Excelling at school, Birch won a place to read physics at Oxford aged 17.
After a year he returned to do his degree at St Andrews instead. He was already hooked on solar. “It hit me immediately; solar had to be smarter than digging stuff out of the ground and burning it. I felt it had to be lower cost ultimately.” He joined Cazenove and then Bear Stearns in US equity sales and sought to build an expertise in clean-tech. On an investor trip to the US to see only listed solar company, AstraPower, where Birch saw a chart showing that the cost of solar was falling fast.
“In 2000 solar cost around 30 [cents per kilowatt hour] and US electricity was around 10c. At the time, everyone was quite right to say that it’s not economic,” he says. “But look back and you’d see a 30 year trend of solar falling in cost by 5pc a year and retail electricity going up about 5pc a year. It doesn’t take much rocket science to know the lines are going to cross at some point in the future.”
What do a revolution, a sun-powered car, and a former Governor have in common?
Find out! https://vimeo.com/72213215
(Hint: they’re part of a future we can be proud of)
Sungevity Co-founder Danny Kennedy has a habit of telling it like it is.
Watch the interview for an insider scoop on the state of the solar industry. Spoiler alert: things are bright.
When people think of jobs in the solar industry, they often think of manufacturing and installation. These are both important, but they’re not the whole story — you might not guess which areas the vast majority of solar jobs are in!
From sales and finance, to project management and customer support, there’s a reason that the solar industry is growing almost 10x as fast as the US economy over all.
Take a peek behind the scenes at some of the solar jobs here at Sungevity, and you’ll immediately understand why the solar industry is great for the economy: there’s so much work to be done, and it’s all about sunshine!
