Solar Power's Power

By Tallie Steiner' 20

Why is solar power important?

Unless you’re outside tanning on your roof everyday, you and your roof are wasting. You’re wasting thousands of photons a second, which are given to us for free from the sun. Photons are particles that make up a quantum of light or other electromagnetic radiation, and carry energy proportional to the radiation frequency. Every lightwave from the sun carries them, and we can use them. They can knock out any easily accessed valence electrons, especially from materials like silicon. Those electrons are manipulated with a magnetic poles within an electrical circuit, and can then be utilized as electricity. This is called the photoelectric effect. And ejecting an electron depends solely on the lights’ frequency, not its intensity, so as long as there’s sunlight, there can be free electricity.

But we only use electricity that’s from solar energy for about two percent of the world’s total electricity usage. The other 98 percent comes from coal, natural gas, water, and other energy sources, that are often times are more expensive day-to-day and emit greenhouse gases. However, from 2007 to 2017, the world’s total installed energy capacity from photovoltaics increased 4,300 percent. That’s because the upfront installation cost of solar panels has dropped by 70 percent since 2010, and they’ve been less bulky and more efficient.

You probably don’t even know where the energy that charged the device you’re reading this article on came from, so why should you care about switching your source to solar? The answer is that you should care about greenhouse gases. They’re changing our Earth as we know it. Today, over 700 different species are in danger of extinction because of changes to their environments, sea levels are higher than they ever have been before, and the global area hit by extremely hot temperatures has increased 50 times since 2010. If this doesn’t strike you enough to want a change, just thinking about the rays on your roof being wasted right now. Something so simple as a couple of installations above your head would be taking a huge step forward for saving our planet.