Here is a new, hour-long documentary, ‘The Power of the Sun’. This film is the brainchild of solar energy historian John Perlin and Walter Kohn, a Nobel laureate in chemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Do you know that the solar energy that strikes the Earth’s surface for one hour is enough to feed the world’s current electricity needs for one year?
So why haven’t we gone solar already?
John Cleese of Monty Python asks this in the film touring the history of solar power. It tours from the controversy over the wave and particle theories of light to the first solar-powered batteries made at Bell Labs in 1954 to current developments on solar panels.
According to the film, solar energy is a $7 billion industry, and it’s growing 30%-35% a year! The film focuses on the ‘silicon solar cell science’ and seems to have targeted high-school students and college freshmen with a physical sciences bent as its target audience.
Getting distributed from state, private, and federal sources, the making of the film costs $500 000.
You can purchase it for $10 here.
Via: Physics Today
