According to wikipedia, the total amount of solar energy reaching earth's surface is a mind boggling 3850 Zettajoules every year, while the total energy consumption on earth was 0.471 ZJ as per 2004 statistics. Now, a zettajoutle is a fairly crazy number with more than enough zeroes for humanity to be bothered about in some time, but it does make one thing very clear...the answer to the global energy crisis is up there!

With the global energy (read oil) prices touching new peaks everyday and global warming being finally acknowledged as a pressing concern to the existence of humanity, a lot of noise is being made for a shift towards the so called bio fuels. Without going into the demerits of those, I would focus here on the merits of solar energy and also its use in standalone applications like LED trailers.

LED trailers are used for a variety of applications in the western world today and though the shift from halogen and neon to LED has indeed ushered in substantial savings in consumption of power, they are still a big single power consumer and being mostly used for outdoor publicity, advertising and traffic and civic management purposes, they are a very visible and wasteful consumer of power in these troubled times.

Now going back to the statistics in the first paragraph of this article, such standalone and outdoor applications and power consumers do make a fitting case for the shift towards solar. With the improvements the LED industry has seen over the years and the sudden research interest in improving efficiencies of the existing solar panels, the two technologies are well on the path of a convergence. Though no credible statistics are available for the same, but intelligently analyzing the ones available, it can be safely assumed that shifting all the outdoor trailers in North America to solar LED based ones could save energy enough for hundreds and thousands of homes. Not just that, since solar devices do not normally have engines, it would drastically reduce ambient noise pollution levels. There are also no greenhouse gas emissions, in fact, any emissions whatsoever. And even at current levels of technological nascence, it makes tremendous economic sense at current high oil prices, a factor that will only improve with more research into solar technologies.

Solar my friend is the way to go if we have to save our troubled planet, but as things with mankind go. Nothing makes sense until it makes economic sense. And fortunately, green does make immense economic sense today. Stock markets value green companies much better than conventional and less respected companies, the money savings are substantial and anybody can do with a good dose of free PR. No wonder, the new Google headquarters, the "Googleplex" is designed to be a green building with zero external power and relying totally on solar power to save energy equivalent to the consumption of a 1000 California homes. Now, if that is what one corporate headquarter can do, just imagine what can be done!

Al is the author and webmaster of a Football Tickets resource website.