Learn about the potential solar energy and how charged particles generated from the sun travels to the earth to provide heat and light. You can also explore solar energy as the direct and indirect energy source and find out the pros and cons surrounding harvesting solar energy for various uses in our life.
Solar power is the energy which is generated from the sun’s energy either through the use of photovoltaic cells operated in solar panels and transparent or directly as heat energy. Standard photovoltaic solar panels are known as the most efficient application of solar power. However, photovoltaic glass enables the generation from surfaces like house and office windows which were previously incapable of anything yet passive solar energy and also makes possible other options, such as the options in terms of color. Other sorts of technologies include the low-tech solar heaters which are created from recycled goods which provide a cheap source of heat.
Concentrated solar energy uses a number of lenses or reflectors to gather more of the sun’s heat or thermal energy. Thermal energy which is congregated through the day is usually applied to oil or salts which retain heat to boil water for steam turbine generators all night.
In the data center, solar power and some other kinds of clean and renewable electricity, such as tidal power and wind power, are increasingly applied to save money, enhance self-sufficiency and improve continuation as well as sustainability. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are among the massive IT establishments which invest in renewable energy.In addition to being more affordable than fossil fuels, solar power avoids the costs which are associated with environmental damage through, spills, extraction and taking issues with pollution which is generated through the combustion of energy.
The Sun
Imagine that you are vibrating particle which comes off the sun-a very tiny speck of energy called photon. You can travel from the sun out toward the remaining solar system. You and your other photo counterpart band together to construct electromagnetic waves, which are the waves of energy possessing a set frequency within electromagnetic spectrum. The speed of your waves stipulates what kind of electromagnetic energy you are, and since you came from the sun, you will fall in the middle of such vast electromagnetic spectrum. This means that you and other photos are very specific types of electromagnetic energy, which is called infrared, ultraviolet, and visible light.
Waves in the Electromagnetic Spectrum
Since you are the particle of light, you can travel at the speed of light, and that takes you as well as your friends in the same electromagnetic wave around 8.5 minutes to make a staggering 94 million mile journey to Earth. When you and other photos bump into atoms, it causes part of the electrons from the atoms to jump around, which gives off energy which can be simply harnessed for many uses here on the earth. Let us take some closer look at the sun as the massive source of energy.
The sun denotes a star one million times the earth, which means that if the earth were the head of a pin, the sun then would be about the size of basketball. The sun is very hot ball of gas. The surface is approximately 6,000 degrees Celsius, and the sun obtains even warmer the further you go toward its core. This is since a process, which is called fusion, occurs at the core of the sun. Nuclear fusion is what takes place when small nuclei get fused together to create bigger and heavier nuclei. The whole process needs a great amount of energy. You can refer to this term by noting that the word nuclear refers to the nucleus as the part of atom, and the word “fusion” is related to joining or fusing of these objects together. So, the nuclear fusion is virtually nuclei which fuses together in the extreme heat of the sun, which leads to the release of vast amount of energy.
Energy denotes the ability to do work, and “solar” is Latin word for the sun. So, we may define solar energy as energy which is obtained from the sun. We can also put this energy to work in various ways for us, from living spaces and heating water in our houses to generating electricity. Solar energy is a kind of radiant energy, so known for the vibrating particles which radiates from the sun which we talked about earlier. In this case, solar energy is oftentimes named solar radiation for this reason.
The Pros and Cons Surrounding Solar Energy
There has been a great amount of talk regarding the use of more renewable energy, or the sources of energy which can replenish themselves, such as solar, wind, hydroelectric power. Different from carbon-producing fuel sources, such as oil and coal, we may depend on renewable sources, such as wind and sun, to continue the provision of energy without necessarily ever being depleted or using up energy.
If we could actually capture all of the sunlight which shines on the earth in an hour, we were enabled to supply the world with energy for the whole year. On a more partial scale, a simple 3-foot by 3-foot patch of the earth situated in a sunny site gets around 2,000 kilowatt hours of solar energy over one year’s time. It does make sense, then, that we try to use this widely abundant renewable sources of energy. Another reason which makes solar energy a desirable energy source is the fact that it does not generate greenhouse gases, such as carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide, which are gas in the atmosphere trapping heat and is considered to contribute to the global climate change. But, solar energy is not a kind of slam-dunk process when it deals with supplying the world with energy. We will lose a great amount of energy through the process of gathering solar rays, and the technology is still somewhat costly.