The Heat of the Sun

The heat of the sun is about equivalent to burning a trillion tons of coal an hour. Even though only a small fraction of that heat ever reaches the earth it is still more then enough to power the whole world. In today’s society, the growth of energy demands is exploding. Many of the energy sources that supply society with power currently run on non-renewable resources such as oil and coal. These resources also pollute our environment. Other resources such as hydro and wind power are not as reliable as they fluctuate in availability due to environmental conditions. It is important to consider alternative resources of energy, as the current forms and output will not sustain the world at the current increase in societal demands. One viable and almost unlimited source of energy is the sun. Solar panels make use of the sun’s light hitting earth everyday and convert it to a usable form of energy and have the potential to fulfill the world’s energy needs.

We first must answer the question ‘How does the Sun generate energy?’ The Sun uses a process of energy known as fusion (Coffey, 2010). This means that the Sun is taking the two atoms of one element and fusing it into another element. This process releases large amounts of energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. This includes radio waves, visible light, and gamma rays. When this radiation hits the surface of the Earth, some of that energy is reflected, but a lot of it is transformed into heat energy. This means that much of our current uses of solar energy are basically the usage of the heat energy that the Sun generates. However, we can also use the Sun’s energy to generate electricity.

The usage of solar energy has many benefits that will arise. First of all, solar energy is what is known as a perpetual resource ("Renewable resources," 2000). A perpetual resource is a resource that is not affected by human use. What this means is that the usage of solar energy won’t affect anything that the Sun does. Unlike hydroelectricity, which will affect the normal aquatic ecosystem, using more solar panels will not affect the way the Sun’s rays hit the earth.

Solar energy is completely non-polluting. Changing electromagnetic radiation into electricity does not release any sort of carbon based gas emissions. In fact, you could argue that solar energy actually decreases pollution. The usage of solar energy can then affect the amount of non-renewable resource electricity generation that we use. If we use more solar energy, then we will not need as many coal and petroleum electrical generating plants. This means that using solar energy is actually lessening our impact on the environment.

There are three forms of indirect solar power. They are wind power, waterpower, and ocean thermal energy. You might think these have nothing to do with each other or solar power but they do, in some way they each use the sun. The first type