Solar Energy Essay

Solar energy in one form or another is the source of nearly all energy on the earth. Humans, like all other animals and plants, rely on the sun for warmth and food. However, people also harness the sun’s energy in many other different ways. For example, fossil fuels, plant matter from a past geological age, is used for transportation and electricity generation and is essentially just stored solar energy from millions of years ago. Similarly, biomass converts the sun’s energy into a fuel, which can then be used for heat, transport or electricity.

Wind energy, used for hundred of years to provide mechanical energy or for transportation, uses air currents that are created by solar heated air and the rotation of the earth. Today wind turbines convert wind power into electricity as well as its traditional uses. Even hydroelectricity is derived from the sun. Hydropower depends on the evaporation of water by the sun, and its subsequent return to the Earth as rain to provide water in dams. Photovoltaics(often abbreviated as PV) is a simple and elegant method of harnessing the sun’s energy.

PV devices (solar cells) are unique in that they directly convert the incident solar radiation into electricity, with no noise, pollution or moving parts, making them robust, reliable and long lasting. Solar cells are based on the same principles and materials behind the communications and computer revolutions, and this CDROM covers the operation, use and applications of photovoltaic devices and systems. Introduction Photovoltaics is the process of converting sunlight directly into electricity using solar cells.

Today it is a rapidly growing and increasingly important renewable alternative to conventional fossil fuel electricity generation, but compared to other electricity generating technologies, it is a relative newcomer, with the first practical photovoltaic devices demonstrated in the 1950s. Research and development of photovoltaics received its first major boost from the space industry in the 1960s which required a power supply separate from “grid” power for satellite applications.

These space solar cells were several thousand times more expensive than they are today and the perceived need for an electricity generation method apart from grid power was still a decade away, but solar cells became an interesting scientific variation to the rapidly expanding silicon transistor development with several potentially specialized niche markets. It took the oil crisis in the 1970s to focus world attention on the desirability of alternate energy sources for terrestrial use, which in turn promoted the investigation of photovoltaics as a means of generating terrestrial power.

Although the oil crisis proved short-lived and the financial incentive to develop solar cells abated, solar cells had entered the arena as a power generating technology. Their application and advantage to the “remote” power supply area was quickly recognized and prompted the development of terrestrial photovoltaics industry. Small scale transportable applications (such as calculators and watches) were utilised and remote power applications began to benefit from photovoltaics. In the 1980s research into silicon solar cells paid off and solar cells began to increase their efficiency.

In 1985 silicon solar cells achieved the milestone of 20% efficiency. Over the next decade, the photovoltaic industry experienced steady growth rates of between 15% and 20%, largely promoted by the remote power supply market. The year 1997 saw a growth rate of 38% and today solar cells are recognized not only as a means for providing power and increased quality of life to those who do not have grid access, but they are also a means of significantly diminishing the impact of environmental damage caused by conventional electricity generation in advanced industrial countries.

The increasing market for, and profile of photovoltaics means that more applications than ever before are “photovoltaically powered”. These applications range from power stations of several megawatts to the ubiquitous solar calculators. PVCDROM aims to provide an overview of terrestrial photovoltaics to furnish the non-specialist with basic information. It is hoped that having used PVCDROM you will understand the principles of photovoltaic devices and system operation, you will be able to identify appropriate applications, and you will be capable of undertaking photovoltaic system design.

By gradually increasing the number of people who are familiar with photovoltaic concepts and applications, we hope to increase the use of photovoltaics in appropriate applications. Properties of sun light The light that we see everyday is only a fraction of the total energy emitted by the sun incident on the earth. Sunlight is a form of “electromagnetic radiation” and the visible light that we see is a small subset of the electromagnetic spectrum shown at the right. The electromagnetic spectrum describes light as a wave which has a particular wavelength.

The description of light as a wave first gained acceptance in the early 1800’s when experiments by Thomas Young, Francois Arago, and Augustin Jean Fresnel showed interference effects in light beams, indicating that light is made of waves. By the late 1860’s light was viewed as part of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, in the late 1800’s a problem with the wave-based view of light became apparent when experiments measuring the spectrum of wavelengths from heated objects could not be explained using the wave-based equations of light.

This discrepancy was resolved by the works of 1 in 1900, and 2 in 1905. Planck proposed that the total energy of light is made up of indistinguishable energy elements, or a quanta of energy. Einstein, while examining the photoelectric effect (the release of electrons from certain metals and semiconductors when struck by light), correctly distinguished the values of these quantum energy elements.

For their work in this area Planck and Einstein won the Nobel prize for physics in 1918 and 1921, respectively and based on this work, light may be viewed as consisting of “packets” or particles of energy, called photons.. Today, quantum-mechanics explains both the observations of the wave nature and the particle nature of light. In quantum mechanics, a photon, like all other quantum-mechanical particles such as electrons, protons etc, is most accurately pictured as a “wave-packet”.

A wave packet is defined as a collection of waves which may interact in such a way that the wave-packet may either appear spatially localized (in a similar fashion as a square wave which results from the addition of an infinite number of sine waves), or may alternately appear simply as a wave. In the cases where the wave-packet is spatially localized, it acts as a particle. Therefore, depending on the situation, a photon may appear as either a wave or as a particle and this concept is called “wave-particle duality”.