Industry Solar energy -- energy derived from the sun -- supports virtually all life on earth. Solar energy was valued by the early Greeks, Native Americans and ancient Chinese, all of whom oriented their buildings toward the sun, warming their homes via solar heat. Still, thousands of years later, we rely on solar power to meet our energy needs, and as our energy needs grow, so too should our reliance on the sun. Modern solar energy technologies harness the sun's energy to meet today's ever-increasing energy needs.

Thanks to technological advances, the sun's power can now be used for heating, lighting, electricity and even flight. Heat and light from the sun, along with solar-based resources, such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass, account for most of the available flow of renewable energy.

Solar power is used synonymously with solar energy or more specifically to refer to the conversion of sunlight into electricity. This can be done either through the photovoltaic effect or by heating a transfer fluid to produce steam to run a generator. Photovoltaic (PV) are solid-state semiconductor devices that convert light directly into electricity.

They are usually made of silicon with traces of other elements and are first cousins to transistors, liquid electronic devices (LEDs), computer chips and other electronic devices. A photovoltaic device (generally called a solar cell) consists of layers of semiconductor materials with different electronic properties.