What Are Solar Energy Panels Made Of?
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Sugar and spice and everything nice...or snakes and snails and puppy dog tails? Or would today's young people say that solar energy panels are made of Beiber boys and grown-up toys?
With rays of sunshine, Justin Beiber shines when he's on stage, creating electrifying crowd energy. It's really a shame we don't know how to capture this kind of energy, convert it and use it to power our homes and business. Since we don't, we're exploring how to run our homes and businesses by converting sunlight's energy into electricity through solar energy panels.
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.
It takes a lot of solar energy panels to power the average American home. In an effort to reduce the number of panels necessary to produce sufficient energy to operate a home, or charge a battery for an automobile or generator, materials other than silicon are being experimented with, and some success is being achieved in thin film solar technology, which uses smaller cheaper crystals, like copper-indium-gallium-selenide, that are shaped into flexible films. They're not currently as effective, however, as silicon in creating electricity.
And so...the search for newer and better methods of creating solar energy cells goes on.
The path back to the beginning of solar energy cells is long...and littered with fossil fuel competition. For hundreds of years, however, mankind has sought to take advantage of the sun's energy, and we continue to progress...slowly but surely... to harness this inexhaustible resource.
The Romans, following the path of the Greeks with south-facing windows in their homes, covered the openings with glass or mica to capture and hold in the heat of the winter sun. They discovered the most optimal ways to take advantage, passively, of the sun's energy.
Believing Europe would eventually run out of not only wood but coal, a man named Augusta Mouchout developed the first steam engine that was sun-powered, although it was not done passively. William Gyrlls Adams, in the same time period, found that when light was shined on selenium, the material shed electrons, which created electricity.
Capturing the sun's energy, other than passively, however, was too cost-prohibitive to result in any real development of this work until Albert Einstein's innovative research, combined with work done in 1953 by Bell Laboratories, resulted in the creation of electricity from solar photovoltaic (PV) cells.
And, even then, it was considered too expensive. Despite the success of scientists' Daryl Chapin and Calvin Fuller's work in creating measurable electrical current with solar photovoltaic cells, further progress in solar energy cell research and development essentially lay dormant.
Laying in stagnation until 1973 and the Arab Oil Embargo, the Western world's reliance on oil was suddenly thrust forward. In an attempt to find alternative energy sources to offset reliance on fossil fuels, the U. S. government began subsidizing research and development. Then, Japan rushed into PV energy in solar rooftops in the 1990's, which created economies of scale for mass production, resulting in the beginning of price drops for 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.
Rural areas particularly in third world countries, however, with more than abundant sunshine, are finding solar panels very cost-effective for their small homes. They're cost-effective not only in providing solar power, but in negating the carbon footprint left by the fossil fuels they would otherwise use.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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