The use of Solar Energy and other clean energy sources, if they were cost competitive with carbon based systems, would certainly be preferred. If and when these technologies can compete with oil, coal and natural gas still remains an unknown. Governments have offered tax advantages and other financial incentives to use and develop these systems.
As for generating power from the sun, thus far no particular technology has emerged as one that can be competitive on a large scale with fossil fuels. Devices like solar cells have been researched and studied for many years now. These can take energy from the sun, which strikes the semiconductor material in the form of photons, and converts that energy into electrical current. All these types of devices have inherent limits on the amount of current that can be produced. Great advances have been made in this regard over the years, but they are still not cost competitive with fossil fuels.
Concentrating light such that more photons are available to create more electricity has been an approach tried in recent years. Large concentrations of light, the equivalent of perhaps 300 times the light from the sun, are directed toward specially made semiconductor devices. Rather exotic semiconductor compounds are used because they have properties that lend themselves to making these types of devices operate optimally. This is as opposed to using the most common type of semiconductor material, which is silicon. Silicon has been used in high volume chip making for decades now, its properties are well understood, and it is rather inexpensive because it is produced in high volumes.
A more direct approach than solar cells is solar heating. In these systems the sun heats up a liquid material. The energy, in the form of heat, can be pumped through pipes to heat a house or other building, for example, or it can be converted into electricity. These systems are certainly functional, but they cost more to operate than burning carbon based products like coal, gas, or heating oil.
Even with the price of oil at over $100 per barrel, it will be some time before these and other clean energy systems are cost competitive with petroleum based energy sources. This means that governments will still need to fund a multitude of projects to make the systems more efficient or even invent new ones. They will not stop, however, because the supply of fossil fuels, especially crude oil, is not infinite. Someday the earth's population will need to adopt other forms of generating the energy needed to sustain life as we know it.
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