ABSTRACT
Our planet faces signicant challenges in the twenty-rst century because energy consumption is expected to double globally during the rst half of this century. Faced with increasingly constrained oil supplies, humanity must look to other sources of energy, such as solar, to help us meet the growing energy demand. A useful measure of the level of a country’s development is through its energy consumption and efciency. Excessive fossil fuel energy use not only has caused severe and growing damage to the environment from greenhouse gas emissions and oil spills, but also has brought political crises to countries in the form of global resource conicts and food shortages. Solar and other forms of renewable energy offer a practical, clean, and viable solution to meet our planet’s growing environmental and energy challenges.
