Have you thought that:
- It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the sun’s surface to earth.
- In 5 billion years the sun will run out of fuel.
- A Swiss scientist, Horace de Saussure invented the world’s first solar energy collector, or ‘hot box’ in 1767.
- In the 1830s British astronomer John Herschel used a solar energy collector box to cook food during an expedition to Africa.
- Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his experiments with solar energy and photovoltaics.
- Enough sunlight falls on the earth every minute to meet the world’s energy demands for an entire year.
- If we covered a small fraction of the Sahara desert with photovoltaic cells, we could generate all the world’s electricity requirements.
- All TV and communications satellites are powered by solar energy using photovoltaic cells.