Deploying advanced power electronics could reduce electricity consumption up to 30%, or 12% of total U.S. energy use.

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Even more fundamentally, the digital economy's infrastructure has advanced basic material science and classes of machine tools that have led directly to the new high-power electronics (enabling hybrids) and to big, cheap flat-panel, thin-film PVs (derived from the massive thin-film machines that make flat-panel-TVs).

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