Solar Energy Is A Boon To Life
Booting up your preferred search engine and looking for renewable energy will unveil a few words you might have heard before: geothermal, hydro power, biomass, wind and solar. But what are they, exactly? They are simply examples of clean energy.
Grant it, that presents another question: what is clean energy? Unlike fossil fuels – coal, oil, gas – clean energy has zero emissions, meaning safer for the environment, and is more often than not more efficient than their fossil fuel cousins. While many forms might not be on the average individual’s mind, solar is one most people will probably be aware of because it is one cited most often.
What Is Solar Energy?
Every morning you are greeted by the sunshine of the sun. You can feel the heat it gives off warming your skin. But did it ever occur to you that you were being touched by energy? How is that possible when it is 93 billion miles away? If I only had two words to describe it? Nuclear fusion.
The sun, or its more poetic name “Sol,” releases energy, without taking breaks, in the form of photons. Those photons then travel a great distance, taking eight minutes to reach us, before finally falling to our planet. This solar energy is just being tossed onto us without compensation and with the invention of solar panels, they are specifically built to cash in on this precious energy source.
How Does A Solar Panel Work?
For the sake of simplicity, solar panels contain atoms known as electrons. When photons crash into these electrons, the electrons are ripped free from their atoms and as a result of this, electricity is generated.
It is a lot like a game of pool. Imagine you have three billiard balls; the cue ball is a photon and the other two billiard balls represent an electron attached to an atom. In this analogy, your cue stick is the size and when you strike the cue ball, it represents the sun releasing a photon. When the cue ball, or the photon, smacks into the atom, or the other two billiard balls, it represents the electron being ripped free of the atom.
Because of this union between solar and solar panels, per tonne of materials mined from nuclear and fossil fuels don’t come close to the lifetime energy generate from solar, and wind, by a whopping 100 times. While the energy used to create solar panels won’t get paid back until a year or two, you can’t be a service life spanning decades.
Solar Is A Boon To Life
Opting for solar panel fitting has only increased in use for the average individual. It is common to see more efficient products be used more often when prices decrease, like solar panel fitting, when their yield and efficient is greater. In fact, citizens have been switching to some form of solar panel fitting as much as 20 percent in a year in just the past 15 years. This has led to a collective amount of 1.3 million solar panel installations, which has given the United States 40 gigawatts of energy. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, who did the math, that kind of energy could fuel 6,560,000 homes just in the United States alone. How? Because 1 megawatt can at least power 164 homes.
Not convinced? We’re being showered with so much solar energy, we are currently receiving 10,000 times more energy in a single day then we actually use. In a number, that is about 120,000 terawatts on any day. Who wouldn’t want solar panel fitting? Maybe Sol needs paid.