A 52-home community in Canada is heated entirely with solar energy:
Solar heating is a more exciting prospect than solar generation of electricity because heating is a much larger percentage of a home’s total energy use (60% for space heating, 20% for water heating, and 20% for appliances, lights, and other electrical loads).
Think about it. How much energy is used just to heat stuff up (water, mainly, but your living space as well in some parts of the world)? If you could capture the heat (insert Rub Goldberg-ian system of fresnel lenses, solar collector dishes, coils of pipe filled with solution that is used to store and transfer the heat) and tap into it as needed, how much electricity would we save? In many of the cold parts of the world, they get a lot of winter sunshine that could be collected and stored as heat, with no need for electricity (except perhaps to turn a pump to move the heat around: easily handled with a low voltage one powered by the same sunlight).