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| solar panels installation services solar energy system westinghousesolar dealer sales wiring electrician westinghouses solar panels installation in Greenville SC solar panels services solar energy system solar panels Westinghouse solar dealer sales wiring electrician Westinghouse Solar manufactures,solar panels distributes and markets highly powerful, highly reliable solar power systems,solar panels, generating renewable electricity for homes and businesses, solar panels electrical services, wiring, solar panels installation, Westinghouse dealer, solar panels installation in Greer South Carolina upstate,solar panels rc construction Solar, great power solutions for home and business,solar panels,solar panels, pv, compare, Kyocera solar panels, GE solar panels, BP solar panels, Sharp solar panels, evergreen solar panels, Mitsubishi solar panels, Sanyo solar panels, SunTech solar panels, SunWize solar panels, watts solar panels, solar, panel, modules, power, systems, solar panels RC Construction Solar installs solar panels and collectors for heating, cooling, lights, water, pools and living off the grid in North Carolina and South Carolina and Georgia, Consider Solar energy for an efficient sustainable alternative energy source for your home or business solar panels Solar panels have become something of a catchphrase in the green movement this decade. They trumpet the recent advances, both scientific breakthroughs and manufacturing triumphs. They point at the bright, glittering future of solar power, but who are they, and what does what they say mean for you as a consumer? To understand what the culture around solar panels today stands for, what the people involved in the conversation over the future of solar power are talking about, and where the possibilities depart from reality, it helpful to know a little bit about the history of solar power. Solar power is a form of renewable energy, and that itself is a big part of the green movement agenda. The green movement would be the referred to in the preceding paragraph. Going green means living within a balance that must exist between you and your environment, a balance that humanity has too often let fall to the wayside in recent times. It means to minimize your impact on this earth, and offset or even eliminate your use of nonrenewable resources. These goals may seem lofty and unrealistic. Backers of the green movement would counter that the unrealistic position to hold is expecting our species to be able to go on consuming as we currently do indefinitely with no repercussions. The primary difficulty with solar power and indeed with its cousin wind power has been one of efficiency. There is more than enough energy hitting the earth in the form of solar radiation to meet power needs of our species. Estimates indicate that there is four times as much wind energy available for our use as the species uses every year. Solar power is even more dramatic, the sun showers the planet with more energy every day than we use in a year. So the difficulty has never been the availability of sun and wind, they are readily available. The difficulty with solar panels has always been the efficiency of power transfer. You see, it is one thing to say that the sun showers us with several terawatts of power every day, and another thing to put that power to work for us. The majority of modern human power use is electric. This means we need to convert the radiant solar energy to usable electric current. This presents a technological hurdle for us, because for most of our history, our electric conversion has been turbine based. Solar panels however, dont utilize a turbine at all. Instead sunlight striking silicon crystals creates electric potential. If those crystals are backed by an array, this potential can be harnessed to create a current. This transfer of sunlight to electric potential has always been an inefficient one. The scientist who first harnessed this effect, which he dubbed photovoltaic, was only able to elicit a 1% return on the energy he put into his solar cell. He created his cell by coating a semiconductor (selenium) with gold. Through a century of refinement, we have painstakingly reached solar panels that can produce a return of more than 30% of the power they receive. One of the reasons behind this is that any given semiconductor only responds to a certain wavelength of light. This means a single-substance solar panel will only ever be able to convert a portion of the sunlight it receives to electricity; no matter how well it converts that portion. That, in essence is where we stand today. Manufacturing advances in the past decade have finally lowered the cost of solar panels to the point that a 30% efficiency panel can pay for the cost of production and installation over the first six years of its life. This means that solar power is finally economically viable, since panels are designed to run for at least 10 years before they start to break down. Where do we stand now? Currently, solar panels are a viable alternative energy source, both environmentally and economically. Grid-tie systems allow you to put up solar panels, and feed excess power back into the power grid. This isnt an act of charity on your part. Utilities are required to pay you for the power you put into the system. |
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