This week’s trade fact from the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC is about solar power. Though technology for capturing and using the sun’s energy has improved over the years, the untapped potential is still enormous. Some of the numbers are staggering:

Solar Land Surface Radiation: 223,400 trillion kilowatt-hours/year
World electricity consumption: 17.48 trillion kilowatt-hours/year
World solar-cell energy capacity: 0.07 trillion kilowatt-hours/year

The article says that in only 18 sunny days, the “Earth’s land surface receives as much energy from sunlight as its crust holds in recoverable reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas.” If that weren’t impressive enough, 42 minutes of daylight contains enough energy to power the world’s electrical power utilities for a year. To be able to catch and use a fraction of the total means a flow of clean and near limitless energy.

Solar power is finally becoming competitive to traditional energy sources. This is especially true in Germany, where government regulation and incentives dovetailed with the spike in energy prices in 2007 and 2008, resulting in substantial investment in solar power.

Germany now has 3862 megawatts of solar cell capacity or about half the world’s total solar-cell megawattage. America, by contrast, has 830.5 megawatts of capacity. In America, concentrated solar power contributes a paltry 0.2 percent of America’s electricity. A look at trade numbers also shows that America is importing more solar cell technologies than it is exporting, though both numbers have nearly tripled in the last 3 years.

While solar power has distinct disadvantages such as no night time production and decreased production during cloudy weather, it is unwise to not more fully tap such a plentiful and clean source of energy. With improving electricity distribution infrastructure and doubling the supply of renewable energy both goals of the stimulus bill, it is now America’s turn to investment in these technologies and once again lead the world by example.

- Justin Manger