Presenters

One point seven billion people struggle to meet their basic needs without access to affordable and adequate energy services. A third of the world's people lack access to electricity for basic household and livelihood needs. The world's oldest energy technology, the cooking fire, remains the most widespread fuel-using technology today. Reliance on traditional fuels and technologies, because of time demands and localized air pollution, is a hardship that keeps a large fraction of humanity - particularly women - locked into cycles of poverty, ill-health, and deprivation. By using new LED lamps though, the energy used in a single 100 watt incandescent bulb can effectively light an entire village

Biography:
Dave Irvine-Halliday is a photonics engineer, professor at the University of Calgary, and winner of the 2002 Rolex Award for Enterprise, The 2002 Tech Museum's Knight Ridder Equality Award and the 2003 Saatchi and Saatchi Award for Innovation in Communication.In 1997 while helping the Institute of Engineering, University of Tribhuvan in Kathmandu launch its electrical engineering degree, he discovered that most remote schools and the majority of Nepali homes had no, or inadequate, lighting. This led to his intense research into Solid State Lighting systems for the developing world and its promise of dramatically reducing the energy requirements and cost of home lighting.
Currently president of the Light up the World Foundation, Irvine-Halliday's work has grown from field testing a handful of White LED lamps in remote Himalayan villages, to lighting with the help of affiliates, entire villages in Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, The Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Bolivia, Irian Jaya and more.