Solar Panels
Whilst Solar Energy is free and freely available to each and every one of us, you could easily treat it as the most valuable resource available on the planet. Harnessing the suns energy mechanically is not a new technology, in fact if you go back in time to around 1830, John Herschel made use of a special box that was constructed to capture the suns solar rays, this was used to heat food whilst on an expedition . If you go back a thousand years, home builders commonly built homes in the correct orientation to make use of the solar energy the sun offered back then – these both were a simple but effective methods to harness solar energy from the sun.
It has been calculated that every square meter of the earth’s surface, when averaged out can provide almost 170 watts of energy. That’s great, but we cant just stick our plasma TV in the sun in the middle of the garden and expect it to work!
That’s where Solar Panels come into play, stick a solar panel in the sun in the middle of your garden next to your television and the solar panel will convert solar energy from the sun into electricity that will make your electrical equipment work. Solar Panels don’t need to have the sun shining on them all the time to produce electricity, they will still produce electricity on a cloudy rainy day, but best performance will come from your solar panels in bright sunlight.
A Solar Panel is made up from a collection of solar cells, otherwise known as photovoltaic cells that are all connected together within the solar panel .
