There are two fascinating facts about solar energy that people don’t usually take into account.
1st, all energy on earth is solar energy in one form or one more. The only difference is that solar electricity utilizes this energy right away, although other forms lock it away until it is released by way of combustion (such as burning of coal, oil or wood).
Second, the thought of utilizing sunlight as a direct energy source is far from new. Methods of employing direct sunlight as a form of utility energy have been the object of experimentation for at least two,000 years. Nonetheless, the concept of solar electricity is a fairly new idea that only got traction about sixty years ago. It was in the late 1940s that the first practical solar cells were finally developed.
For a lot of years, the price of solar electric power made it impractical to use on a significant scale, in spite of the fact that the earth’s surface receives 1,000 kilowatts of energy per square yard of surface every single sunny day. The techniques and supplies necessary to manufacture the panels were initially extremely costly, meaning that solar electricity cost a number of times what consumers paid for utility energy from oil and coal-fired plants.
That gap is closing rapidly even so, partially due to less expensive and much more efficient techniques of manufacturing solar panels and partially due to increased efficiency of the panels themselves. Existing trends indicate that solar electricity will reach grid parity – meaning that it will be competitive cost-wise with other forms of electrical energy – by the year 2020.
At present, the key challenge facing the solar energy business (aside from the oil and coal industries and their Washington D.C. lobbyists) is how to get electricity from a generating plant to the communities that want it. The locations in the U.S. that are most suitable for producing solar electricity are far from most major population centers (the exception becoming those in the Southwest such as Las Vegas and Phoenix) and would need massive and high-priced infrastructure projects in order to connect them to the existing grid.
The most likely solution is to install miniature solar generation equipment on individual buildings and homes as has been carried out in Germany for numerous years. This would provide an added benefit to homeowners who could feed their excess electricity back into the grid and truly be paid for it, successfully brining their solar energy expenses to zero.