It’s already slightly that way, for instance you can get tax rebates for buying solar panels.

If it was broken down into ‘per capita emissions’ though, this would be a very different story.

clipped from www.newkerala.com New Delhi, June 30 : India will put solar energy generation at the forefront of its battle against climate change, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced here Monday while releasing the national action plan on climate change. Emphasising the primacy of developing solar power, Manmohan Singh promised to “pool our scientific, technical and managerial talent, with sufficient financial resources, to develop solar energy as a source of abundant energy to power our economy and to transform the lives of our people”. He felt success in developing solar energy “will change the face of India. It would also enable India to help change the destinies of people around the world. The plan intends to go beyond government to draw upon these assets”. “Every citizen of this planet must have an equal share of the planetary atmospheric space. Long-term convergence of per capita emissions is, therefore, the only equitable basis for a global compact on climate change.

This company made an innovative portable solar generator to help developing countries transport medical equipment by camel back through the desert. And yes, I think that the CFS49IS of the generator name does stand for Camel Fridge System.

clipped from solarpowerwegrant.blogspot.com

clipped from www.edn.com

A Finnish company, NAPS Systems, addressed this need in the 1980’s with this mobile camel-solar-powered refrigerator. This version evolved into a more boring, but presumably more universal system, today’s CFS49IS.

When the photons from sunlight hit a silicon molecule, they knock loose one of its free-floating electrons. This electron hits another silicon molecule, shunting it’s electron out of it’s molecule. This starts a chain reaction, rather like one domino striking another, which knocks over another, and another…

The final result of this chain reaction is what is known as an flow of electrons, or an electrical current.

This solar electrical current then flows through the electrical circuits of your house. It powers whatever you have on at the time lights, fridges, computers. And that’s how you turn sunlight into electricity.

Thin film is cheaper than traditional silicon panels. There are several reasons for this.

One is that thin film solar cells use a lot less of the material that make makes electricity: silicon. Silicon is very abundant natural, but in its purest form, it is expensive. Thin film uses extremely thin layers of silicon, lowering the cost.

The other reason thin film photovoltaics cost less is the manufacturing process. Traditional photovoltaic require a lot of expensive manual labour. The process of applying silicon to the backing for thin film is similar to that of a printing press. This means lower labour costs and fast production.

The main disadvantage of these type of solar panels is that they are less efficient than traditional solar. This means you need more roof area to produce the same ammount of solar energy.

One innovation in this area is solar tiles. These tiles have photovoltaics in built, eliminating the need for traditional roofing. This can lower the cost of installation.

In conclusion, thin film photovoltaics have advantages in their price and their range of applications. While they are not as efficient as traditional solar panels, they are developing fast and may indeed overtake traditional silicon panels.

I would like to about any other new progresses that have been made for cells other than the nanotechnology. Would there be any new ways of making the cells so that you can have more efficiency? People have still not figured out how to have 100% efficiency. Right?”

In Photovoltaic panels, the electricity is generated by photons (packages of sun energy) dislodging electrons held within the silicon crystalline matrix. These dislodged electrons then became a flow of electrons (electric current.)

The efficiency of these silicon panels lies in the structure of the silicon, and the way the photons interact with it.

What this means is that light energy in a photon not used in dislodging an electron is diffused as heat. This energy is not converted to electricity, and is therefore ‘wasted’ or inneficient.

The amount of energy each photon is controlled by the light wave length. For a long time, monocrystalline photovoltaics were limited by this restriction. They could only convert a fixed percentage of sunshine into electricity. Then multicrystalline solar cells were developed. These used several types of silicon in multiple layers (hence the name.)

These different layers of silicon could react to different strenths of photons, making the solar cell more efficient. The highest current efficiency is around 42% for a concentrated solar cell. This uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto the solar panel.

One very interesting emerging solar technologies is solar thermal. It isn’t new, and works in its simplest form by focusing sunlight with a mirror onto a pipe filled with fluid.
This fluid then heats and moves, driving a Stirling engine. Stirling engines are almost 200 year old, and very efficient if they are kept running at their optimal rate.

What makes solar thermal an exciting technology is that many companies are claiming they can produce solar thermal energy a $/watt price that is as cheap as coal.

This could be the end of the ’solar race’ that has been heralded in the solar world for the last few years. Now it looks it is finally in sight.

“WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner today announced that with DOE funding, a concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has recently achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance. This breakthrough may lead to systems with an installation cost of only $3 per watt, producing electricity at a cost of 8-10 cents per kilowatt/hour, making solar electricity a more cost-competitive and integral part of our nation’s energy mix.”

It’s important to note here that this is for a concentrating solar cell. This means solar energy is concentrated, usually by mirrors, at the solar cell. Most domestic and mainstream solar panels are not concentrating.

High-tech meets Low-tech in the Thar Desert, India

I took this photo in 1999, while trekking through the Western Desert of Rajasthan , a province of India near the Pakistani border.

The young man in the foreground had a solar panel on his house roof. In a truly ironic twist, the solar panel’s purpose was to power a small fridge that kept coca-cola cold to be sold to tourists. (He could obtain a high profit margin as there was no competition.)

I had to admire his entrepreneurial spirit.

There is a real opportunity though, for solar power to truly empower those living off the grid, and in very rural locations. Solar power is valuable in that it requires no nation-wide infrastructure to work.

Solar power can be owned and administered by small communities. It is independent of fuel prices and tariffs. And it is even more useful in desert locations, where power is often obtained by burning the already sparse vegetation.

“In many diagrams I have found that the PV cell is wired to a load. What is a load? What is it made up of? What does it do?”

A load is a demand for energy. For instance a load would be when you turn on the toaster. If your solar panel is connected to a toaster - then it is servicing this load. For an electrical current to flow, there has to be a load. This is similar to water flowing from a high place to a low place.

So in the solar energy diagram, when it shows a load, this could be any demand on energy that the solar panel supplies.

Solar energy loads can be handled in several ways. The peak time for producing solar energy is usually from about 9am to 3pm. This is when it’s sunniest. However, this is usually when most people are away from home.

So, how to utilize your solar energy? The first way is to use a grid-tied system with net metering to sell power back to the grid. The grid tied means that if you are generating more power than you are using, the excess gets sold back to the power company, and then gets used by other people on the electric network.

Net metering is an arrangement you have with your power company. This is usually done via a special power meter or an attachment on your power meter. The price that your power gets bought back at is also part of this arrangement. This is the part where you can watch your power meter spin backwards.

The second way is to have batteries to store excess energy. This is very useful in areas of frequent power cuts. Without batteries, your solar panels only supply energy when they are making it - ie. when it’s sunny.

With batteries, your excess power is stored. As long as you don’t use up all the battery power, your will have electricity when the whole neighborhood grid goes down.

This was one reason why many Florida residents got solar panels. During the last hurricane, some folks had no electricity for six weeks. Their solar powered neighbors were enjoying hot showers….

There is a new technology emerging that uses solar panels made from plant dyes, or dye-sensitised cells.

This uses the same technology as plants to create energy from the sun. (Known as photosynthesis.)

These panels take less (coal) energy to produce than silicon cells, making them even more attractive ecologically. They are also cheaper, partially because silicon takes a lot of energy to extract.

These solar cells can take advantage of much larger range of sunlight - in the way plants do. This means they have the potential to be used in low light situations.

They are also transluscent, which gives them an interesting range of applications. Possibly windows and skylights in the future will be solar cells as well.

However, dye solar panels are less efficient (right now) than silicon solar panels. This is the challenge scientists are currently working to overcome. Solar plant dye is an interesting technology, that may in fact become a major player in the solar energy market.

Links: New Zealand People Imitate Plants to do Solar Panels on the Cheap