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| Solar Energy A dream ever closer to reality | ||
| by Sandro Pintus | ||
| When we look at the Sun we are amazed by the power of the star which gives life to our planet, and we can understand why our ancestors adored it as a divinity. Since the birth of the Earth, the Sun has been the major protagonist, and it continues to be so because of the light and heat which it goes on irradiating over the planet. The ball of fire which we see shining in the sky every day has, like the wind, the characteristic of being freely available to all; it is a gigantic laboratory where, every second, more than four million tons of hydrogen are transformed into energy.
We use this energy every day when we eat the food which nature puts at our disposal, and when we use other products like petrol and coal with solar energy stored inside them. But what humanity has always sought to exploit efficiently is that surplus which serves the human race for the production of heat and electric energy. The deterioration of the environmental situation of the planet caused by pollution has incentivated the study of solar energy, and in recent years technological research has achieved results which would have been unthinkable up until a few decades ago, especially where the transformation of solar energy into electricity is concerned. Having abandoned research after the discovery of petrol and methane, we have now returned to studying all the potential applications of solar energy. As well as the production of electricity, these include the desalination of sea water, the exploitation of the greenhouse effect in agriculture, the transformation of urban refuse and the air-conditioning of buildings. There is a vast range of uses offered by a source which is inexhaustible, clean, continually renewed and free. | ||
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