Question: Why do you think that solar panels are worth putting research and money into?

Niamh Ryall answered on 10 Jun 2017:

Hi Laura

I think it’s important to put research and money into solar panels because the sun provides more energy to the Earth in one hour than all the people on the planet use in an entire year, so we only need to capture a little bit of that to power the planet. There’s no more powerful source of energy at our disposal.

There’s also only a certain amount of carbon dioxide we can emit into the atmosphere before we start doing irreversible damage to our planet, so we need to move away from fossil fuel burning and towards a power source that is sustainable for the future. There are lots of options out there and I think we’ll need a mix of all of them, (such as biomass for transport fuels, nuclear fission and one day perhaps fusion, wind turbines for countries like ours where it isn’t always sunny, tidal power, geothermal power where they have hot water vents etc with storage of power by new solar fuels, new batteries and hydroelectric pumped storage etc). At the moment, the cost of solar panels is coming down all the time and that’s encouraging more people to buy them, which brings their cost down! This is starting to make solar power pretty cheap in comparison to old fashioned power because you don’t need to buy fuel for a solar panel! So it’s starting to become possible to produce solar power as cheaply as old-fashioned power, but we need more research in order to keep making it better and better so it becomes cheaper and cheaper.

It also means that people without any connection to electricity (about 1.2 billion people) could have electricity without having to rely on the construction of an electricity grid.

One of the things people research is also where best to put them and also how climate change might effect them, such as by making some parts of the world cloudier. That might change where people decide to put them too.