I would ask any by-passer on the street whether he or she thinks that solar energy is as powerful as we can get them these days, chances is that most of them would think so.
Well, I hate to give you bad news ... the answer is NO!
Why? Well, Lets start with the basic facts... First, solar energy is not necessarily available only in form of electricity that must go through copper wires to power our lamps, appliances or electric vehicles, etc. Our solar industry are hard at work trying to coax more electrons out of solar panels made of silicon crystalline materials of sorts and other materials. We know that we can only manage to squeeze as much as 25% of the maximum potential that can come out of those panels. It means that up to 75% are still playing ping-pong with each other in the confines of the silicon materials.
There is another way to coax more out of sunlight that can yield almost 100% of the sunlight into a different form of energy we know as heat .. It is not going to be electrons but photons. Photons doesn't carry electrical charges but heat or light interchangeably depending on what designs you use to capture or manipulate photons.
You may ask yourselves what is the good uses for light or heat if we cannot get them out of our wall outlets. This is a good and stupid question if I must tell you that... with a stress..
We get heat directly from natural gas, heating oil, firewood and also electricity, right ? We use hair dryers to blow our hairstyles dry with electrical heat, right? We use firewood to heat indoors , right ? What we left out is sunlight that we can also use to generate heat we need . It is rather ironic to watch solar energy guys come up with only solar cookers while leaving out other interesting solar ideas like solar furnaces or solar fireplaces as I may like to call them. There is many great solar ideas that we simply REFUSE to adopt ourselves.
We continue to pollute neighborhood air with firewood and to lesser extent with heating oil and natural gas and we are still happy with this. We just beat up our fleet of coal power plants that we know that we cannot replace with solar panels for a very long time to come. We can achieve this much faster with photon based solar energy .
We power a plethora of tools and equipment with electricity, gasoline, diesel, etc while we confine solar energy only with one single prevalent product known as solar panels and nothing else!
We can design solar clothes dryers, for instance. Don't you think so ? We never thought of that , do we? We can develop a new plethora of solar powered tools and equipments if we want to.
We just don't bother with that and what we get is another oil glut! Oil and natural gas producers watch us doing same old ways and say to themselves, "Gee, we better drill more wells so they cannot accuse us for gouging oil prices !, lets go!" Chainsaw Freddys think the same way as well!