Solar panels are changing the world, powering everything from cars and trains to blenders and homes. But did you know the solar panel was invented 140 years ago? This important green technology followed a long road before it started to transform the world.
The sun is a remarkable source of energy. In 2019, humans used about 74 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity each day, and it would take only six-and-a-half days of the sun’s energy to power our civilization for a year. Of course, that would require humans captured all the sun’s light every day. But solar panels don’t convert all the solar energy that strike them into electricity and we can’t put solar panels everywhere.
If we wanted to run the whole world on solar-generated electricity using today’s technology, we would need 23,313 square miles of solar panel “farms,” an area about the size of West Virginia. As…