How Does A Solar Energy Panel Work?

How does a solar energy panel run? This is a typical question in solar power and solar energy management. Though we all know solar energy panels run off of the sun, as with most things, the actual answer is a lot more complicated.

Whether solar panels can meet the energy needs of your home depends on the size of your home, the efficiency of your home’s insulation, windows, lighting, heating and appliances. It is also influenced by your own power usage habits.

The following will give you a good idea how solar panels work:

Solar panels for your home are all about the free flow of electricity through a circuit. Not dissimilar to water flowing through a faucet. One of the best things about generating electricity with solar panels is that they have no moving parts and create no noise, no pollution, no radiation and require no maintenance.

The idea behind solar cells is like all power generators, they convert one form of power – sunlight – into another form of energy – electricity.

Like a transistor, solar cells are made of semiconductor materials. The primary material is silicon, essentially, the stuff between your toes at the beach. The only time solar power cells generate electricity is when sunlight is striking them. At night, they generate nothing.

Now, in order for electricity to be generated, we need two plates sandwiched together; one with a negative charge and one with a positive charge. Conductive wires connect the two plates together.

As natural sunlight strikes the two plates, the most important particle in the sunlight (for our purposes) is the photons. As the photons strike the negative plate (the one facing the sun), the photons “knock off” electrons from the atoms in the negative plate and those electrons “flow” to the positive plates and that “flow” creates electricity.

While one solar cell only creates a tiny amount of electricity, when you create a large panel of solar cells, a large amount of energy is created. That, of course, is one of the problems with solar energy. It takes several very large panels to generate enough electricity for just one house.

What’s more, as the sun moves and the panel no longer directly faces the sun, the efficiency of the panel drops quickly. And of course, clouds can reduce the flow of photons from the sun and we get less electricity. And lastly, at night you get no electricity so you must make sure you have a method of storing electricity.

Originally posted 2010-01-04 14:59:56. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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