A solar farm in the sky, solar power stored in soil and solar-powered cities!

World Changing Ideas

From Queens, New York over to West Africa down to Southwest Florida and up to Europe, we're jumping from soil to sky in our exploration of how solar energy could power our world.

Contributing WCI reporter Blake Odom investigates how you can set up solar power for your home. He looks into the installation costs, the time needed, and the potential savings.

Energicity is hooking up West African countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia with solar power minigrids.

Babcock Ranch is one of the few places in Florida that did not lose power when Hurricane Ian hit in September. And that's because it runs on solar power. It's a living laboratory for how we could power our towns with solar energy.

Dr. Michael Harbottle is developing a way for soil to store solar energy. Bacteria in the soil will help this process by performing electrosynthesis. Wild! Especially considering how current solar batteries require lithium, which is a finite resource.

The Solaris initiative is working on creating a space-based solar power to decrease energy decarbonization on Earth. Over the next decades, it could build a 2 km-long satellite over Europe that harnesses solar power directly from the sun and beams it back down to Earth!

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