In today’s world, a need for renewable forms of energy is ever growing. Global warming has been accepted as a real threat with serious repercussions for our environment, and we are constantly working on ways to reduce our fossil fuel consumption and utilize more efficient, less harmful forms of energy. When one thinks of sustainable energy, a few general types come to mind, like wind power with towering windmills, hydroelectric power with dams and rivers turning turbines, nuclear power that can generate massive amounts of energy with much less material consumed than fossil fuels, but can also produce hazardous wastes and has extreme consequences when not handled with care and caution. What also comes to mind is solar power. One pictures solar panels on rooftops, lining the sides of highways, huge fields of panels in wide open spaces which receive large amounts of light. Solar power is the most effective and efficient type of renewable energy, and is our best bet for renewable energy in the future, but it will take time.

Sunlight is one of the most readily-available resources on our planet. It is more accessible than other energy sources, like fossil fuels, water, or wind power, and is safer than energy sources like nuclear power. The amount of sunlight that the earth receives in a second is 1.8*10^17 Joules and humanity uses about 1/10000 of that equivalent of energy per day, to put it in perspective. If we could manage to harness that 1/10000 of the energy the sun gives the earth, we would have no reason to use any other source of energy but solar power, completely eliminating the threat of fossil fuels to our environment and any energy crisis we could run into in the future. In this article on a diploma thesis by Nadine May at the Technical University of Braunschweig, the area of land required for solar panels to power for example Germany, all of Europe, and the world, are represented by the red squares in a photo (around 200 square kilometers) over an image of the Sahara Desert in Africa, one of the places on Earth to receive the highest amount of sunlight per day. Now this thesis was made in 2005, and new developments in solar energy technologies have since then made solar panels much more efficient now than they were back when this thesis was written, so in current times it would take even less area to power the world.
With all this evidence backing up how awesome solar power is, why isn’t more widely implemented across the world nowadays? Well, the answer to that would be we just don’t have the technology to make it feasible yet. The efficiency of converting sunlight to usable electric energy even with today’s solar-related technologies is bordering on 20% efficient with high quality commercial solar panels. The amount of materials to cover about a 200 km squared area with solar panels would be so ludicrously high that the world simply doesn’t have the resources to accomplish such a task yet. Also there are the issues of storing all that potential generated electricity and transporting it across the globe if we are to have just one massive field. With cables used to transfer electricity, they lose that electricity over larger distances. Electricity also cannot be stored for long periods of time because it will slowly dissipate out from its storage device.

The technology we have today isn’t enough to make a sunlight-powered world a reality. But over time, technology improves and scientific advancements are made. With time, we will find ways to create more efficient solar panels, wires that lose less electricity with distance traveled, and ways to store electricity for longer periods of time. These advancements can hopefully help solar power lead us to a cleaner, brighter future.