The sun from Earth. So powerful! NASA/Reuters There's one simple fact that may just change your thoughts on renewable power.

In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in an year.

To put that in numbers, from the US Department of Energy:

Each hour 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the Earth. That's 430 with 18 zeroes after it!

In comparison, the total amount of energy that all humans use in a year is 410 quintillion Joules.

For context, the average American home used 39 billion Joules of electricity in 2013.

Clearly, we have a source of virtually unlimited (the sun won't die out for another 5 billion years or so) clean energy in the form of solar power — we're just not capturing it.

Energy consumption in the US. US EIA Last year, solar only provided 0.39% of the energy used in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Renewables — including solar, wind, hydropower, biomass and geothermal — accounted for 13% of the total.

There's a big push for renewables, for obvious reasons. They don't increase our carbon footprint or exacerbate global warming, like burning fossil fuels does.

We can't, and shouldn't, continue using oil and coal forever — it is, as Elon Musk has said, "the dumbest experiment in history” because we are changing the Earth's atmosphere without knowing the consequences.

So if solar is so powerful, why are we still using so little of it?

Are solar panels the future? Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images A large part of the problem boils down to batteries. We haven't developed batteries that can store enough of the energy produced by solar efficiently enough so that it can provide reliable power. Essentially, we need batteries that are good enough to store the incredible amounts of solar energy that are constantly hitting the Earth so we can use it when it's not sunny.

Another issue is our ability to actually capture all of this energy from the sun. Researchers around the world in government labs and at energy companies are developing better solar panels every year, yet the typical array on people's houses today can only convert 14% of the energy it captures into electricity, according to Northwestern University. Lab tests have increased this past 20%, but this performance will likely take years to translate into actual market use.

One day, we'll be able to capture all of the energy that our sun provides. It's just going to take time, investment, and a whole lot of innovation.

Editor's note: In an earlier version of this story, we miscalculated the percent of US energy that came from solar last year. It was 0.39%.