How Renewables Like Solar Power Are Set to Save the World

Our economy, and pretty much all economies, greatly rely on fossil fuels. What are fossil fuels? They're essentially ancient compounds in the ground, such as natural gas, coal, and petroleum that usually contain a significant amount of carbon. They're ideal for chemical reactions that create energy, and, like most good things in life, they aren't set to last.

It's no secret that coal and oil are going to be gone someday, and even before they're gone they cause quite an environmental toll to burn. Hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, may get natural gas out of the ground at unprecedented rates, but it also was the identified cause of the major midwestern US earthquake that occurred just earlier this month. Global warming is accelerating faster and faster as we burn harmful toxins and heat into the atmosphere, hurting the ozone layer. Nuclear reactors have caused some of the worst man-made environmental disasters of all time.

So what are the alternatives? Surely there is enough discussion about the harm of conventional energy that we can focus on the ways to move forward to help our society, economy, and environment. This is the first in a series of posts about how alternative energy is moving us forward. Let's start with solar power.

A Solar Panel / CC by Jimmy_Joe

Solar power is a broad term, but in the context of using alternative energy as an economic resource, it's usually referring to using solar panels to convert our sun's energy into electricity. Our sun's light is the source of all life on Earth, so it's not a huge stretch at all to imagine us utilizing all the energy that otherwise often goes wasted.

The big problem here is that it's really hard to capture the sun's energy efficiently. We can put panels, like the one pictured above, directly in sunlight, and it's really not a big problem. Where we run into issues is how much of those rays actually come out the other end into the power grid.

The great news, though, and what makes solar power incredibly exciting, is that scientists are making huge gains here! While the normal solar panel in the 1950s could harness about 4.5% of its captured sunray's energy (yikes!), and most solar panels in the past decade have hovered between 14-20%, innovator and entrepreneur Elon Musk said in a Mashable article last year that his company was going to introduce a rooftop panel that would harness a record-setting 22.04%.

What's particularly exciting about this is that while it sounds like a small gain, even a gain of 2% creates a huge amount more over the course of a year, especially on a huge scale. With all the gains that have been occurring so rapidly in the 21st century with regards to solar efficiency, it's been risky to buy and install a panel on your house with the knowledge that it will soon be outdated. Now that we're reaching the outer limits of what we previously thought possible, many industry experts speculate that critical mass is soon to be expected. Neighborhood solar will be a reality.

This would be a huge, crazy, nation-altering shift for the US. Having solar panels installed on rooftops would become just another piece of maintenance. It would add a new sector to our economy and create a gigantic surplus of energy out of nowhere, almost overnight. Many could even sell their surplus power back to the grid, creating a profit, and better energy prices for all. With the prospect of electric vehicles in our future, electric-generating homes seem like a pretty smart bet. It may not be long before our daily routines and lifestyle change significantly for the better.