“Renewable Energy”

by Dr. William Kao, University of California, Clean Technology Institute

Abstract: In his inaugural address on January 20 this year, President Barack Obama re-affirmed his new Administration’s commitment to address climate change through additional development of renewable energy. A key passage of the speech reads: ‘We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.’

The plan is to invest in alternative and renewable energy, reduce demand for foreign oil, address climate change and create millions of new jobs. The Obama ‘New Energy for America plan’ aims to help create five million new jobs by strategically investing US $150 billion over the next decade, ensure 10% of US electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25% by 2025 and implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade scheme to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050.

This talk will cover the fundamentals, individual opportunities, challenges and limitations of each of the seven major clean, renewable energies: solar, wind, hydro, biomass, ocean (tidal, and wave), and geothermal.

Some topics covered will be concentrating solar power systems, thin film solar PV cells, biomass and biofuels, wind turbines, hydroelectric power, ocean thermal energy and ocean mechanical energy from tides and waves, and geothermal heat and electricity.

The talk will also cover briefly the global emission’s Kyoto Protocol, and the California Solar Initiative.

Bio: Dr. William Kao has been working in the Semiconductor and Electronic Design Automation industries for 30 years. He has a BSEE, MSEE and PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was an Adjunct Professor at UCLA Electrical Engineering Department where he taught courses in computer aided circuit design.

He is editor of the “Computer Communications Journals”, the “ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing”, the “ComSoc Surveys & Tutorials” and the “IEEE Internet Computing Magazine”, and a former editor of the “IEEE Transactions on Image Processing”, “Journal of Communications and Networks” and “IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking”.

Dr. Kao held engineering and management positions at Texas Instruments, Xerox Corporation(11 years), Cadence Design Systems (17 years) , Arcadia Design and Magma Design Automation.

From 1989-2000 Dr. Kao was Group Director of R&D at Cadence Analog, Mixed Signal and Custom IC group. He was VP of Engineering at Arcadia Design, and VP of Design Services and Operations at Magma Design Automation in 2000.

From 2001 till February of 2008, he was Group Director of R&D at Cadence IC Digital Group responsible for the Silicon Encounter and Silicon Ensemble product lines.

Dr. Kao has authored more than 40 technical papers at major conferences in the areas of circuit simulation, place and route, mixed signal test, design methodologies, and mixed signal design.

Dr. Kao is a Senior member of IEEE. He was also Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, a member of CAS Technical Committee on Analog Signal Processing. In 2006 he was Chair of the Circuits and Systems Chapter in Silicon Valley.

Dr. Kao currently teaches Renewable Energy and Business Sustainability at the Clean Technology Institute and University of California Silicon Valley extension. He is also on the Technical Advisory Board for Sigma Quest on the topics of Energy and Environment, and Quality Control and is an Energy Consultant for various companies and investment firms.