“Every five days, the sun provides the Earth with as much energy as all proven supplies of oil, coal, and natural gas,” reports Singularity Hub in a powerful summation of the potential power of solar energy. “If humanity could capture just one 6,000th of Earth’s available solar energy, we’d be able to meet 100 percent of our energy needs.” The attempt to harness one of the most abundant clean energy resources–sunlight–has been a long and historied endeavor, starting all the way back in the Industrial Revolution when French scientist Alexandre Edmond Becquerellar first discovered that a solar cell had the ability to convert sunlight into electricity through the photovoltaic effect in 1839. While it took a long time before we had the technology to make a commercial solar cell, in the United States, solar power has received government support for nearly 50 years. So why hasn’t solar power–clean, renewable, […]