Go solar!

“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power!” Thomas Edison said this. In 1931.

Humans have long understood the power of the sun and its connection to life on earth. Early civilizations, from the Egyptians to the Aztecs, worshiped it as a deity.

For a few decades now we've known that we could harvest the sun's energy to generate clean, renewable energy. Yet much less than one percent of our energy supply comes from solar.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, enough solar energy strikes the nation in a single day to power it for a full year. Read that again and think about that...

I was reading earlier that solar seemed ready to break through in the early 80's after the Carter administration funded research into it. But then Reagan apparently killed all the funding and advances stalled. I wonder what lobby was behind that decision (big coal? big oil?)...

Seems like things are moving again, at a rapid pace. Lots of funding is fueling lots of innovation and technological advances. Subsidies are making solar commercially viable, something it will need for a while until a certain scale can be achieved.

One type of project that I find just brilliant: Making covered parking out of solar panels. For anyone living in the lower half of the US for example, where the sun is abundant, you know how painful it is to get back into a car that's been sitting in the sun. Many places - malls, employers, airports, etc... - have huge outdoor parking lots with no covered parking. What if we could cover all these parking spaces and pay for it by licensing the 'roof space' to electricity producers? Truly seems like a win-win.

Other examples are big 'box' stores like Wal-Mart's or grocery stores using their huge flat roofs to generate at least part of the power needed to run the store.

There is no limit to the ingenuity of human beings and the marvels that modern-day engineering can produce when enough time and resources and focus are applied. Let's make clean, renewable energy the challenge of this generation, let's succeed and make that our gift to the next hundred generations.