Chapter 10 - Solar Energy: The Largest Energy Resource

This chapter discusses the solar energy as the largest energy resource. The fraction of electricity generated by solar technologies is small but growing rapidly, with enormous potential to generate a large fraction of the world's electricity needs while significantly reducing global carbon emissions. Realizing this potential, however, will require overcoming both technical and economic barriers. In the short term, it will be important to decrease costs, improve solar conversion efficiency, and implement electricity rate structures that capture the time-varying value of solar-generated electricity. In the long term, challenges will include using material resources more efficiently, integrating intermittent photovoltaic electricity into the grid, and building transmission capacity for utility-scale solar generation systems linking areas with good solar resources to population centers.