With Mayor Eric Garcetti’s push towards renewable energy for Los Angeles it’s time for us to look at just what that means. In this Virtually Rick we take a look at solar energy and the awesome power of the sun.

So how does solar power work?

Well first up you need the sun, basically a huge thermonuclear reactor in space that in just one hour hits the earth with more power than the entire world uses in a year.

Should we tap it? You bet your sweet nostrils we should! 

How? Why with a solar panel, or if you want to be technical, a photovoltaic module (Ooooohh, look at me and my big words!)

Photo means light and voltaic means electricity produced by chemical action. And the chemicals are where it’s at man! Because they convert light energy into electricity. Yes, but how? Well by magic actually.

Solar panels are mostly made of the stuff you find at the beach. Sand which is this stuff: silicon.

Silicon is a semi-conductor, meaning it can carry electricity with a little bit of encouragement, especially if you add chemicals to it, then it’ll do it quicker.

Looking at a cross-section of a piece of solar panel, we've made it look like a sandwich just to make it easier to understand. The green layer has got more electrons making it negatively charged. The red bottom layer’s mix means it’s positively charged.

Where these two layers join, there’s a kind of one-way force field, in this case, it's a special mayonnaise, dividing them and making it so the electrons can't go down, they can only go up!

So when the sun’s rays hit the solar panel sandwich, the protons from the sun pass into the green layer and force electrons to break off, more and more of them are created, so it's like a massive dance party in the negative layer. And those electrons are looking to hook up with something positive!

So metal strips on the panel help to connect them and they flow into the positive layer, then bond and end up back in the green layer above. They keep going around and around, like a current in the ocean, an electrical current! Electricity!

And this happens billions of times a second!

Join a bunch of these panels together and you can power your house with a power inverter. It routes the power into your home and the bonus is that if your solar panels make more than you need, it’s sent off to the grid to help charge my electric toothbrush,, amongst other things.

And a bi-directional electric meter means it’ll run backwards and so will your bills -- in a manner of speaking.

As of January, 2019, the Los Angeles Department Of Water and Power says that Los Angeles now has enough solar panels to generate 354 Megawatts of AC electricity. That’s roughly 2.5 percent of the amount generated for the whole city. 

And if you consider something even more amazing -- that if we covered the Mojave desert with solar panels we’d have enough energy to power the ENTIRE United States. Or even more incredible - that if we covered a mere one percent of the Sahara dessert, we could end the power problems of the entire world FOREVER.

Well, perhaps it’s not so hard to see that the future of our planet might be a whole lot sunnier than we thought!