The Future of Africa Is Coming from the Sun
I did write this Op-Ed as one of my assignments for my Energy for The Future class, as I was finishing my Junior year. "The Sun is a clean, free, and renewable energy source available to all. Solar power is energy delivered from the sun and converted into, for our purposes, electrical energy. It is necessary the auxiliary of solar technologies to harness this energy to generate electricity – photovoltaics, solar heating, and cooling, or concentrating solar power, which is used to operate Solar Power Plants. According to Lou Kraft, Chief Executive Officer of SolSuntech Inc. – a solar panel manufacturing company, 85 percent of African land receives more than 2,000 kilowatt-hours of solar energy per square meter per year. However, as observed in the figure below (Figure 1), it currently averages a 43 percent access rate to electricity. This number is half of the entire global access rate (87 percent). As much as we talk about price, the biggest obstacle to deploying solar energy