Remember the old adage…”snakes and snails and puppy dog tails?” Or what about…”sugar and spice and everything nice?” Today’s younger generation might be more inclined to say energy panels are made from Beiber boys and grown-up toys…or something like that.
Justin Beiber is the sunshine of many young hearts, and when he shines on stage, the crowd energy is electrifying. Unfortunately, we don’t currently know how to capture this type of energy to use it to power our homes and businesses. So for now, we’re looking at solar energy panels, created by converting sunlight’s energy into electricity to run our homes and businesses.
OK, seriously, what are solar energy panels made of? For the most part, solar panels consist of solar cells that are built from captured impure silicon crystals. Impure silicon crystals are used because pure silicon isn’t electrically active. The impurities themselves create an ability to attract…or to lose…electrons. Sunlight, and all light, has energy. When the energy of sunlight hits the impure silicon crystals, it creates an electrical current from the moving electrons. As they absorb light, the electrons move, and then are forced to flow a certain way which creates an electrical current. Contacts, generally metal, are placed at the top and the bottom of the cell, called a photovoltaic, or PV cell, and power is pulled out. The term PV or photovoltaic, comes from combining the words photo…meaning light…and voltaic…meaning electricity. If you look around your house, and others, you’ll probably see a calculator that’s powered by a PV cell. Many small electronic devices, like calculators, along with landscaping lights and others, have PV cells that generate their power.
A group of PV cells connected electronically and placed into a frame is called a panel, and a group of panels connected together is called a solar array.
Powering the average American home takes a lot of solar energy panels. To reduce the number of panels needed for enough energy to run a home, or a generator, or to charge a battery, materials other than silicon are being used with some success. With smaller, cheaper crystals, like copper-indium-gallium-selenide, which are shaped into flexible films, thin film solar technology is showing promise and success. So far, though, silicon is still the most effective in creating electricity.
And so…the search for newer and better methods of creating solar energy cells goes on.
Going back to the beginning of the creation of solar energy cells, one would find a littered path of fossil fuel competition. However, for hundreds of years, man has been working on harnessing the sun’s energy. Slowly but surely, we are making progress in our ability to harness and use this renewable energy source.
Both the Romans and the Greeks found that by covering their south-facing window openings with glass or mica, they could capture and hold in the heat in the winter. Using the sun’s energy passively, they discovered the most optimal advantage.
Then, in 1861, a man named Auguste Mouchout, believing Europe would eventually run out of coal, developed the first sun-powered steam engine, a non-passive use of the sun’s energy. And, in that same time period, a man named William Gyrlls Adams discovered that light shined on selenium caused the material to shed electrons, creating electricity.
However, the expense of capturing the sun’s energy made it cost-prohibitive for any real development of this work, and non-passive solar energy innovation lagged until…through research by Albert Einstein…the creation of electricity from solar photovoltaic cells (PV) progressed another notch with work done in 1953 by Bell Laboratories.
Still, it was considered cost-prohibitive. Although there was significant success through the work of scientists Daryl Chapin and Calvin Fuller in creating measurable electrical current with PV cells, progress in solar energy cell research and development went nowhere for a long period.
Having lain in stagnation until the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973 demonstrated the Western world’s reliance on oil; the U. S. government began a renewed…and desperate…attempt to find competitive, available alternatives to energy through fossil fuel. With subsidies for research, companies began to find ways to create photovoltaic solar energy cells more economically. Japan rushed precipitously into PV energy in solar rooftops in the 1990′s, which resulted in a significant reduction globally, through economy in scale, in the expense of PV energy cells.
Solar energy panels today, however, remain more expensive than conventional energy sources, somewhat cumbersome, and…in some locations…relatively ineffective. The primary drawback of solar energy panels for normal household use remains the cost of the individual PV panels, and the number of panels necessary to generate large amounts of electricity.
Where sunlight abounds in third world countries, especially rural areas, however, where homes are small, solar panels are very cost-effective. They’re cost-effective for the people using them, and for the of the carbon footprint they…don’t…leave.
Want to find out more about solar energy panels, then visit Timothy Peters’s site at: www.HomeSolarPowerExplained.com
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.