The Future of Solar Energy

Abstract

We can imagine the future in thousands of different ways. Things that we believe we cannot do without today may eventually become useless. New knowledge and ongoing change in the world we live in should encourage us to stretch our imaginations and look farther ahead. In the spring of 1992, in what was long ago the center of imperial Rome, artist Peter Erskine fused the past and the present by means of the sun. I had met Erskine the year before in Denver, at the world conference organized every two years by the International Solar Energy Society (ISES). Amidst all the engineers, chemists, physicists, economists and legislators convened to discuss concrete applications of solar technology and problems of pollution and environmental degradation, there was Erskine, in attendance as an artist of the year 2000. In Rome, Erskine's Secrets of the Sun: Millennial Meditations (Fig. 1) [1] transformed the third-century ruins of Trajan's Market into a theater of human life as he painted it with sunlight. Produced and processed by advanced solar and information technology and guided by the artist's imagination and

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