At the heart of every solar panel is a process that turns light into electricity. It’s called the photovoltaic effect, and it works on a microscopic level. Imagine sunlight not as a continuous wave, but as a stream of tiny energy particles called photons. When these photons travel from the sun and strike a solar cell, they carry enough energy to knock electrons loose from the atoms inside the cell material. Think of it like a cue ball in a game of pool breaking a rack of balls. A single photon strikes an atom and frees an electron.