I’ve not been able to blog for a little while as I have been spending more time than I would have liked visiting a relative in the brand new Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. The hospital, which opened in June this year, is a wonderfully well equipped building with state of the art technology, and my relative has benefited enormously from the technology and the skill and dedication of its staff.
Technology and people going together hand in hand is what it is all about, which is something I was thinking about while listening to the final episode of one of my favourite radio programmes, the History of the World in 100 Objects, broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
I have previously blogged about the programme featuring five objects which gave a background to the Silk Road which connects China with Europe and like many others I was hooked on the debate about what should be the 100th object.
Well, the winning piece was a solar powered lamp and charger chosen to represent man’s ingenuity and the challenges ahead in the 21st century. It’s an incredibly important piece of technology, especially when you consider that up to 1.6bn people on earth have no access to an electric grid and the lamp allows them to be able to continue to work, study or simply function during the hours of darkness.
Based on the use of photovoltaic cells, the technology has the power to transform lives. Britain has many businesses specialising in this area, and in Lancashire and Cumbria there is a rapidly growing group of firms specialising in solid state lighting which is expected to grow from its current 5% of all lighting installations to 30% of them by 2018. UKTI is working with these firms to maximise the international potential of their world leading technology, and to ensure that the global opportunities are grasped as effectively as possible.
Developing solar powered lighting and helping swathes of the world to operate during the night has the potential to radically alter the future landscape of the world. The business opportunities from a low carbon economy are enormous and UK firms must grasp them, but how much more worthwhile it all is when you can see the lives of those 1.6bn people without electricity being transformed at the same time.