Catching Some Rays

Most of us do it every day in the summer; we come out of a store or an office building and into a parking lot that feels like a blast furnace.  We go and climb into a car that has been baking in the sun for long enough to turn it into the sweat box from Cool Hand Luke.
It occurs to me that we are wasting an astonishing amount of energy, all that solar radiation that is really just an unpleasant nuisance, could and probably should be put to some use.
Imagine this instead: you walk out of a store and into a covered lot where your car, while not necessarily cool as a cucumber, is decidedly less inferno like.  You are sheltered, not just from sun, but from rain and whatever other weather might be happening.  Oh, and to top it off, that roof is actually generating electricity, using photo-electric cells.  Not only is that roof and the millions like it that could and probably should be built across this nation of ours making your day just a little more pleasant, it could actually change the way we think about energy and it almost certainly would change the long-term ecological prospects of our world.
Economics assumes scarcity.  The reason why someone hasn't figured out how to charge you for air is because there's just so darn much of it.  Sunlight is another one of those things that, for all practical purposes, is not scarce (except in Seattle).
The most frightening (to some, exciting to others) thing about solar energy is the possibility that electrical energy could be freed from the economics of exhaustible resources.  Imagine if you could assume that electricity would be freely available in almost any parking lot, it would change the practicality of electric vehicles.  Imagine if you could assume that instead of draining the pool of finite resources and/or producing toxic waste materials, electricity was generated with zero waste, zero pollution, zero negative effects.
And it makes your parking area shady.
This utopia is an achievable, sustainable reality, here and now, but it is not free.  Solar is still fairly expensive in terms of start up costs, and people who have been conditioned into thinking of things in the decidedly short term, will usually turn off their long-range vision when it comes with a hefty up-front price tag.
I read today that Iran is upping their investment in solar energy (all in favor of that above a functioning nuclear program right?).  Iran, a place where they deliberately ignore much of what we would call the modern world.  They're getting on the solar power bandwagon.
Why are we not, or should I say, why are we not doing so more enthusiastically.  Our government and, perhaps more importantly the corporations that run off of our consumption, should be falling all over themselves to make this happen.  Can you imagine the shift in global politics if we, the United States of America, could tell the Saudis to take their black gold and stick it back where the sun don't shine (underground I mean).  All of the sudden the Middle east and their perpetual tribal warfare is a lot less of a problem.
Can you imagine if electricity really did manage to shuck off all of those scarcity assumptions and become a non-economic resource?  Admittedly that's a long way off, and there's plenty of capitalist lucre to be had in the process.  There would always be construction and maintenance of the solar arrays as well as the power grid itself, it's not like we would be totally free of utility companies, but they would become a different sort of animal I suspect.
The main problem remains infrastructure, and vision.
Not easily addressed to be sure, but I'm thinking we could try a little harder and see what happens.