April 9th，In a keynote speech in the Future of Technology Summit in Washington, Zhenguo Li, President of LONGi spoke about how solar energy can reshape the future.
Zhenguo Li delivering the keynote speech
Future of Technology Summit is designed for leaders and decision makers that rely on technology to remain competitive. This year, DOE, NASA, GE Power and other organizations all came and shared their insightful opinions upon how the technologies are moving forward and how they are able to change the world.
The future of energy is one of the key topics. During the past decade, solar technology has tremendously progressed, and solar power has reached grid parity in many parts of the world. As energy storage technology keeps improving, solar power will soon become one of the major sources of electricity and further help us to initiate an era of negative emissions.
During the speech, Mr. Li explains how solar energy can reshape the future, restore the earth ecosystems and how solar technology can enable everything to be realized.
He indicated that a consensus has been reached that the energy transition shall go faster and renewables will grow to play a dominant role in energy consumption for the coming 10-20 years. Moreover, PV technology is still making rapid progress and the cost keeps decreasing. It’s reasonable to believe that in the next 2-3 years, PV will become the most economical power source in most parts of the world.
He said: “In fact, when solar power is cheap enough and the manufacturing is fully clean, it can also undertake another more important task, that is, to restore the earth's ecosystem.” It’s calculated that if 70% of the earth's desert areas can be turned into oasis, then all carbon emissions generated by human activities in history could be absorbed. And this enables solar industry a promising future.
When projecting the future of PV technology, he said:” The development of solar technology is changing with each passing day. Paring with energy storage and global energy interconnection, the intermittency issue would be well solved. By then, ‘solar energy + storage’ will be the future energy solution for our society, and it will act as a powerful weapon to deal with climate change.”
During the speech, Zhenguo Li also demonstrate that LONGi has been dedicated in promoting solar power application through technological innovation. Among all players in the industry, LONGi’s R&D input is more than 380 million USD and it has been the most heavily R&D invested company from 2013 to 2017. At present, the specification of the universally-used silicon wafer-M2 is led and made by LONGi. Together with core supporting partners, LONGi has brought the industry into the "diamond wire era". Its mono cell can reach an efficiency of 24.06%, which has taken the leading position in the world. In April 2017, LONGi disclosed its LIR technology to the world, which can perfectly solve the initial degradation problem of monocrystalline products and promote the solar generation yield.
For many years, LONGi has been pursuing clean manufacturing. Since 2015, LONGi has laid out its main production facilities in Yunnan, China and Kuching, Malaysia, where mainly relies on hydropower. This sort of power supply conforms to LONGi's idea of "using clean energy to produce clean energy". Recently, we are searching for some coastal places with rich sunshine and appropriate terrain where is capable to realize a production model that completely powers solar manufacturing with solar energy, that we call it ‘Solar for Solar’. In these areas, LONGi can combine solar power and pumped storage energy together to make the whole value chain absolute clean with zero carbon emissions.
At the end of the speech, Zhenguo Li appealed to all presented experts, scholars, opinion leaders and government officials to stand together and through their influence, help the public well understand that we must act now to accelerate the development of renewable energy. After the speech, all attendees watched the “Solar for Solar” video.