Per Thirty Six: “How a giant nuclear reactor in the sky and some silicon makes electricity, and why that’s the easy part. How The Heck?, a series of interactive explanations of everyday technology designed primarily for curious, non-technical readers.  Every hour, the Earth receives enough sunlight to power all of human civilization for a year. It arrives silently, from all directions, at no cost. We’ve known for decades how to convert this energy into usable electricity at scale using one of the most abundant elements on Earth. Today, we still get most of our energy from resources that are gone the moment you burn them and leave the atmosphere measurably worse on the way out. Some of the friction is legitimate: a lot of our power infrastructure was built for a different era with different goals. Some of it is a political environment where the debate is around whether or not solar energy even works. The physics has been understood for decades and the cost has fallen faster than basically any other technology in history. This piece will cover the science, the economics, and the infrastructure of solar energy.”