Bio
Steve Cochran
As Vice President of Climate and Air at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Steve Cochran manages EDF's domestic and international efforts to reduce greenhouse gases and air pollution. He also serves as the Executive Vice President of EDF's 501 c(4) organization, the Environmental Defense Action Fund and is the Political Director of EDAF's Political Action Committee.
As Vice President of Climate and Air at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Steve Cochran manages EDF's domestic and international efforts to reduce greenhouse gases and air pollution. He also serves as the Executive Vice President of EDF's 501 c(4) organization, the Environmental Defense Action Fund and is the Political Director of EDAF's Political Action Committee.
Brian Dumaine
Brian Dumaine, Sr. oversees Fortune magazine's international coverage and its European and Asian editions. He also directs Fortune's green technology and environmental policy stories. He is the author of the The Plot To Save The Planet: How Visionary Entrepreneurs and Corporate Titans Are Creating Real Solutions To Global Warming.
Dumaine has worked at Fortune for 28 years in various writing and editing positions including assistant managing editor. He has won numerous journalism awards and written more than 100 feature stories for the magazine, including covers such as 'America's Toughest Bosses,' 'The Innovation Gap,' and 'America's Smartest Young Entrepreneurs.' Throughout his career, he has produced investigative pieces as well as articles on marketing, investing, technology, and corporate crime.
Nicholas Parker
Nicholas Parker co-founded the Cleantech Group, introducing the cleantech concept to the investment and business community in 2002. Previously Parker accumulated over 15 years experience starting and investing venture funds worldwide through limited partnerships, family offices, corporate funds and endowments. During this time, he pioneered the first "sustainability" driven private equity funds and participated in one of the first solar IPOs. In the 1990s, he also founded, built and sold an environmental finance firm. He has served as an advisor to multilateral agencies and major corporations.
Parker earned a BA Hons. in Technology Studies (Carleton University, Ottawa) and an MBA (City University, London), and has authored or edited more than ten publications related to cleantech, finance and international business, starting with Investing in Emerging Economies in 1993. He served as Chairman of E+Co, a public purpose investment company for clean energy enterprises in developing countries, and is on several boards, including: Government of Singapore Cleantech Advisory Board, Canadian Centre of Excellence for Commercialization of Research and the X PRIZE Energy & Environment Council. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Parker has lived and worked in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America and currently resides with his two children in Toronto.
Jigar Shah
A renowned visionary committed to renewable energy, Jigar Shah launched SunEdison in 2003 based upon a business plan he developed in 1999 for a university class. That plan became the basis of the SunEdison business model: Simplify solar as a service. This model changed the status quo, allowing organizations to purchase solar energy services under long-term predictably priced contracts and avoid the significant capital costs of ownership and operation of solar energy systems. Under Shah's guidance, SunEdison pioneered the solar power services agreement (SPSA) model, which has turned solar services into a multi-billion dollar industry. SunEdison now has more solar energy systems and megawatts under management than any other company.
Shah is an expert on energy project finance, changing energy policy, working with entrenched stakeholders, convincing different type of customers to embrace energy technology. Today, Shah works closely with some of the world's leading influencers and guides policy makers around the globe on key issues surrounding renewable energy, global warming and sustainability. Shah holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and an MBA from The University of Maryland. He sits on the boards of the Prometheus Institute and Greenpeace USA.
Bryan Walsh
Bryan Walsh focuses on environmental issues in addition to covering general interest and national stories and writes the Going Green column for TIME and TIME.COM. A former Tokyo bureau chief for TIME, Walsh was named writer in August 2007 and is now based in New York. Before his stint in Tokyo, Walsh worked as a Hong Kong-based reporter as well as staff writer for TIME Asia, where he covered a wide range of subjects, focusing on public health, science and the environment. He wrote extensively on the SARS outbreak, reporting from the laboratories of the University of Hong Kong and Prince of Wales hospital. Additionally, he wrote numerous cover stories for TIME Asia on topics ranging from the rise in global obesity to the threat of Avian Flu.
ZOOM IN: Learn more with related books and additional materials.
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
- solar energy
Radiation from the Sun that can produce heat, generate electricity, or cause chemical reactions. Solar collectors collect solar radiation and transfer it as heat to a carrier fluid. It can then be used for heating. Solar cells convert solar radiation directly into electricity by means of the photovoltaic effect. Solar energy is inexhaustible and nonpolluting, but converting solar radiation to electricity is not yet commercially competitive, because of the high cost of producing large-scale solar cell arrays and the inherent inefficiency in converting light to electricity.
- solar energy on britannica.com
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Live Now
