6 Solar Energy Facts You Probably Don’t Know!

You might have been learning a lot about solar as you do research to prepare yourself for your new solar system, but there are some facts that you might still not know. While a lot of the resources out there have a lot of the same information, these facts are what usually falls between the cracks, as often people don’t find them as important as other information. But when going solar, it’s important to learn the absolute most amount of information possible so that you feel confident and prepared when you’re ready to install your very first solar system. Keep reading to learn six incredible solar energy facts that you might not have heard before!

173,000 terawatts of solar energy are continuously flowing to the Earth.

To put that in perspective: Over the course of the year in 2017, the entire Earth consumed 132,000 terawatt-hours of energy. In other words, there is so much solar energy hitting the Earth that if we were able to capture it, we could increase our power usage as a planet by a magnitude of thousands and still have energy left over to save. This means that there’s way more than enough power from the sun ready to be harnessed to allow our planet to run on 100% renewable energy.

There are multiple ways you can capture the sun’s energy.

The energy of the sun isn’t just given off as light, but it also comes off as radiant heat. Photovoltaic solar panels, solar heating, photosynthesis, and solar thermal electricity are just a few of the ways humanity has been able to utilize this free energy. Even just by building your house a certain way will allow you to harness passive solar energy.

Solar energy is as old as plants.

Through photosynthesis, plants have been converting the energy of the sun into consumable energy for a very long time. With the plants converting this energy into consumable stored energy, even mammals and other animals have been utilizing a type of solar energy long before the invention of solar panels, due to the fact that we eat plants to gain energy from them. We’ve also been using passive energy since ancient civilizations, where we would build our homes and buildings in order to get the most amount of heat from the sun on any given day.

PV panels are more efficient than photosynthesis.

Despite the prevalence and history of photosynthesis, today’s photovoltaic (PV) panels utilize about 15 percent efficiency of available solar power. Plants utilizing photosynthesis only use about 3 percent. This means that our homes get more energy to run than a plant does to live!

Over the past eight years, the amount of solar panels installed in the U.S. has increased over 20 times.

On average, if all of the utilized solar energy was combined and divided by the energy demands of each home, today’s home solar panel use is equivalent to power about 5.4 million homes in the United States.

Most of the PV panels in the world were installed within the last ten years.

Consider this the second piece of evidence that people are coming around to solar. The trend for residential solar power and commercial solar power is pointing upward. Although an energy crisis in the 70’s led many to reconsider solar energy as a viable option, decreasing solar panel installation costs and increased concerns over the environment have led to a virtual explosion in recent years.

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