Good, you’re a TEACHER. As an architect I’ve often been called “professor”. It’s an inherited trait from my teacher-grand father. Yes, where people go wrong in solar energy thinking is that there is whole atomic bombs worth of sunlight-energy falling on a tropical square mile every day : their eyes light up...
That’s the artist-right brain response, then comes the engineer-left brain filtering process : 5280^2=27,878,400 sf. At a nominal $10/sf(total solar power system)that’s $278,784,000. At the standard conversion efficiency you get something like 500 to 1000 years just to break even. Been there, done that(27 years ago). This is why no “solar farm”, as a profitable enterprise, exists anywhere in the world; “neva hoppen” as the japanese say.
Good analogy with the marbles. Now tilt the floor so that all the marbles roll into one corner. That’s what a hydroelectric dam essentially does : a vast catchment area as energy collector is reduced to a few high tension cables as a concentrated POINT-LINE.
Well, good luck on getting thru to some of them before the algoreites screw up their minds, at least the smarter ones. There are REASONS solar/wind/waves/geothermal sources are a tiny fraction of the energy market. And as to powering the “hydrogen economy”...show them how to LAUGH at such nonsense.