July, 2014 technical and financial pre-feasabilty study in PDF format:
The sun is an intense powerhouse, outputting in the region of 10
decillion (that's a 1 followed by 34 zeroes) joules of energy per year.
That's a lot. The whole planet is bathed in this wash of energy, and it is
one of the things that makes this such a pleasant place to live. It drives
the weather, heating the atmosphere and making life possible. So,
wouldn't it be useful to be able to convert some of this energy into a
form that we could use?
That's what plants do through photosynthesis, using light to combine
carbon from the atmosphere into sugars that they metabolize to grow.
And the solar panels that you see on an increasing number of roofs do
something similar, converting light into electricity. They can do this
because of something called the photovoltaic effect, which converts
solar energy into electrical energy.