Solar Energy: Here Are A Few Critical Things You Must Know Before Creating Solar Panels

So, you think it's time to build your own solar energy generator to decrease energy costs or have a non polluting source of energy for your family. Before you do that you need to know how it works.

Solar energy is made by sunrays that reach our planet in just a few minutes after they leave the Sun's surface covering the distance of 93 million miles in minutes. After all, light travels with the speed of light. Earth's atmosphere absorbs most of this energy and one third of the sunlight is reflected back into space. What remains is what we can use to create energy.

Did you know that the biggest solar battery on our planet is Earth itself? It absorbs about 174,000 billion kilowatts (kW) from the sun each 60 minutes? All in all, at this step of your "adventure" you should realize that the light produced on one square meter during a cloudless summer afternoon, is worth about 1000 watts.

Unfortunately, the biggest part of this energy goes to waste. The energy that doesn't go to waste gives birth to the winds and sustains life. Organisms that have Chlorophyll use it to generate oxygen, animals and humans need it to strengthen their organisms.

However, we have reached that time in our evolution to be able to gather more energy from the sun. You must know that the types of solar energy are direct or indirect, active or passive.

Direct solar energy is made when sunlight is striking a solar cell directly and electricity is created instantaneously. It directly changes, without any intermediate process.

On the other hand, indirect solar energy needs one more step to transform sunlight into useable energy. It's the case of hydroelectric dams and wind generators, transforming solar-caused wind, rain and other climatic interactions into power.

We can transform sunlight into some other type of energy by:

Solar water heaters: Sun energy is changed into heat. In this process, the sun's heat is collected by solar panels which then heat water which can be used to heat households. The panels are always placed on the top of a buliding or somewhere where they have plenty of sunlight, and are introduced later into a system of tubes called "thermal collectors" to the heating source.

Photovoltaic cells processes: Unlike the solar thermal systems, through this process, photovoltaic cells absorb the sun's light instead of its warmth, so light is transformed into electricity. They are regarded as the future of energy generators and are often silicon-based pieces of material. Solar panels are built of many of such cells, put together.

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