"This sun is a mass of incandescent gas..."

"Averaged over an entire year and the entire Earth, the Sun deposits 342 Watts of energy into every square meter of the Earth. This is a very large amount of heat—1.7 x 1017 watts of power that the Sun sends to the Earth/atmosphere system. For comparison, a large electric power plant would produce 100 million watts of power, or 108 watts. It would take 1.7 billion such power plants to equal the energy coming to the Earth from the Sun—roughly one for every three people on the Earth! "

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Oven/

That's a lot of power we could tap into, if everyone had a solar rooftop (like we do) we would not need another drop of oil or lump of coal!