The Basics
Solar Technology is elegant and simple: Light shines on a crystal, and the crystal converts it into electricity. This process is called Photovoltaics, and is the basis of Solar Technology around the world. There are no moving parts, and the fuel (sunlight) is free, abundant and available to every person in every country on any continent. 
At over 165,000TW collected per day, Solar Energy dwarfs the world current power usage of 16TW per day, and even trumps the projected future usage of 60TW. With such a vast, untapped and most importantly, renewable power source, why not go Solar?
The Science
In a crystal, the bonds (between silicon atoms) are made of electrons that are shared between all of the atoms of the crystal. The light gets absorbed, and one of the electrons that's in one of the bonds gets excited and pushed up to a higher energy level - giving it the ability to move around. That electron can then move around the crystal freely, and we can get an electric current. The basic unit of a solar panel is a solar cell, which usually consists of one or two layers of silicon-based semiconductor wafers. When struck by the photons in sunlight, the solar cell generates an electrical charge due to the "photovoltaic effect", which is what excites the electrons and leads to the process that turns sunlight into energy.
Dozens of these PV Solar cells are packaged together into solar modules, which in turn are packaged into solar panels that are mounted on a rooftop. These cells are arranged in a way that maximizes their hours of exposure to direct sunlight, which in turn maximizes how much energy they can produce. Because the electricity generated by all those solar cells is direct current (DC), it is then sent to an inverter that transforms the power into the same alternating current (AC) used by the appliances in your home and the local utility electricity distribution grid. Increasingly, these inverters are getting "smart" - providing data monitoring for solar installation performance and other grid integration services.
