I was born in the early 1970′s and solar energy has been around in minor capacities probably all of my life.  When I was a small child I remember that there was a house in our town of 2,200 people that had solar panels installed on the roof.  As kids we didn’t think too much about this back then, we just thought that it was a novelty, a house with glass panes on the roof that made electricity somehow.

As I got older I started to learn a little bit about solar energy and how it worked, but never gave it a great deal of thought.  I used a solar power calculator going through school, but it had only a minor impact on my life, a little bit more than parachute pants but not as much as disco as fads go.

When I was a teenager I read a book, a short story excerpt from which, was titled The Roads Must Roll by the late Robert A Heinlein.  He is one of my favorite authors and I my youngest daughter carries the middle name of one of the characters from one of his books.  The Roads Must Roll is a book about a future where the highways have been replaced by something like a large conveyor belt system that transports people from city to city at very high speeds.  They were enabled due to the creation of a solar panel that could convert solar light efficiently into electricity.

It was from this story that my romance with the concept of solar energy began.  However, a romantic notion of an energy not well understood is not going to change the world.  These days it is becoming more and more important that we as a society, should find a more efficient source of renewable energy.  Throughout this column I will explore the potential for solar energy.  There are definitely other possibilities and I am not advocating that solar power should be the one and only however it has more than potential.

Companies are today mass manufacturing materials designed to drape skyscrapers and roof houses to collect the energy from the sun and harness it more.  I want to explore these technologies and I want to explore the efforts that the governments of the world are utilizing to spread the adoption of solar power, from tax credits to research and funding and more.  Please join me on this journey and let us find the light!