Solar

Solar energy is energy that comes from the sun. Every day the sun radiates, or sends out, an enormous amount of energy. The sun radiates more energy in one second than people have used since the beginning of time!

Where does all this energy come from? It comes from within the sun itself. Like other stars, the sun is a big gas ball made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. The sun generates energy in its core in a process called nuclear fusion. During nuclear fusion, the sun's extremely high pressure and hot temperature cause hydrogen atoms to come apart and their nuclei (the central cores of the atoms) to fuse or combine. Four hydrogen nuclei fuse to become one helium atom. But the helium atom weighs less than the four nuclei that combined to form it. Some matter is lost during nuclear fusion. The lost matter is emitted into space as radiant energy.

It takes millions of years for the energy in the sun's core to make its way to the solar surface, and then just a little over eight minutes to travel the 93 million miles to earth. The solar energy travels to the earth at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light.

Only a small portion of the energy radiated by the sun into space strikes the earth, one part in two billion. Yet this amount of energy is enormous. Every day enough energy strikes the United States to supply the nation's energy needs for one and a half years!

Where does all this energy go? About 15 percent of the sun's energy that hits the earth is reflected back into space. Another 30 percent is used to evaporate water, which, lifted into the atmosphere, produce's rain-fall. Solar energy also is absorbed by plants, the land, and the oceans. The rest could be used to supply our energy needs.

2. History of Solar Energy

People have harnessed solar energy for centuries. As early as the 7th century B.C., people used simple magnifying glasses to concentrate the light of the sun into beams so hot they would cause wood to catch fire. Over 100 years ago in France, a scientist used heat from a solar collector to make steam to drive a steam engine.

In the beginning of this century, scientists and engineers began researching ways to use solar energy in earnest. One important development was a remarkably efficient solar boiler invented by Charles Greeley Abbott, an American astrophysicist, in 1936.

The solar water heater gained popularity at this time in Florida, California, and the Southwest. The industry started in the early 1920s and was in full swing just before World War 11. This growth lasted until the mid- 1950s when low-cost natural gas became the primary fuel for heating American homes. The public and world governments remained largely indifferent to the possibilities of solar energy until the oil shortages of the 1970s. Today people use solar energy to heat buildings and water and to generate electricity.

3. Solar Collectors and Solar Space Heating

Heating with solar energy is not as easy as you might think. Capturing sunlight and putting it to work is difficult because the solar energy that reaches the earth is spread out over a large area. The sun does not deliver that much energy to any one place at any one time . How much solar energy a place receives depends on several conditions. These include the time of day, the season of the year, the latitude of the area, and the clearness or cloudiness of the sky.

A solar collector is one way to collect heat from the sun. A closed car on a sunny day is like a solar collector. As sunlight passes through the car's glass windows, it is absorbed by the seat covers, walls, and floor of the car. The light that is absorbed changes into heat. The car's glass windows let light in, but don't let all the heat out. (This is also why greenhouses work so well and stay warm year-round.)

So, a solar collector does three things:

• it allows sunlight inside the glass (or plastic);

• it absorbs the sunlight and changes it into heat;

• it traps most of the heat inside.

Solar Space Heating

Space heating means heating the space inside a building. Today many homes use solar energy for space heating. There are two general types of solar space heating systems: passive and active. A "hybrid" system is a mixture of the passive and active systems.

Passive Solar Homes

In a passive solar home, the whole house operates as a solar collector. A passive house does not use any special mechanical equipment such as pipes, ducts, fans, or pumps to transfer the heat that the house collects on sunny days. Instead, a passive solar home relies on properly oriented windows. Since the sun shines from the south in North America, passive solar homes are built so that most of the windows face south. They have very few or no windows on the north side.

A passive solar home converts solar energy into heat just as a closed car does. Sunlight passes through a home's windows and is absorbed in the walls and floors.

To control the amount of heat in a passive solar house, the doors and windows are closed or opened to keep heated air in or to let it out. At night, special heavy curtains or shades are pulled over the windows to keep the daytime beat inside the house. In the summer, awnings or roof overhangs help to cool the house by shading the windows from the high summer sun.

Heating a house by warming the walls or floors is more comfortable than heating the air inside a house. It is not so drafty. And passive buildings are quiet, peaceful places to live. A passive solar home can get 50 to 80 percent of the heat it needs from the sun.

Many homeowners install equipment (such as fans to help circulate air) to get more out of their passive solar homes. When special equipment is added to a passive solar home, the result is called a hybrid system.

Active Solar Homes

Unlike a passive solar home, an active solar home uses mechanical equipment, such as pumps and blowers, and an outside source of energy to help heat the house when solar energy is not enough.

Active systems use special solar collectors that look like boxes covered with glass. Dark-colored metal plates inside the boxes absorb the sunlight and change it into heat. (Black absorbs sunlight more than any other color.)

Air or a liquid flows through the collectors and is warmed by this heat. The warmed air or liquid is then distributed to the rest of the house just as it would be with an ordinary furnace system.

Solar collectors are usually placed high on roofs where they can collect the most sunlight. They are also put on the south side of the roof where no tall trees or tall buildings will shade them.

Storing Solar Heat

The challenge confronting any solar heating system--whether passive, active, or hybrid--is heat storage. Solar heating systems must have some way to store the heat that is collected on sunny days to keep people warm at night or on cloudy days.

In passive solar homes, heat is stored by using dense interior materials that retain heat well--masonry, adobe, concrete, stone, or water. These materials absorb surplus heat and radiate it back into the room after dark. Some passive homes have walls up to one foot thick.

In active solar homes, heat may be stored in one of two ways--a large tank may store a hot liquid, or rock bins beneath a house may store hot air.

Houses with active or passive solar heating systems may also have furnaces, wood-burning stoves, or another heat source to provide heat in case there is a long period of cold or cloudy weather. This is called a backup system.

4. Solar Hot Water Heating

Solar energy is also used to heat water. Water heating is usually the second leading home energy expense, costing the average family over $400, a year. Depending on where you live, and how much hot water your family uses, a solar water heater can pay for itself in as little as five years. A well-maintained system can last 15-20 years, longer than a conventional water heater.

A solar water heater works in the same way as solar space heating. A solar collector is mounted on the roof, or in an area of direct sunlight. It collects sunlight and converts it to heat. When the collector becomes hot enough, a thermostat starts a pump. The pump circulates a fluid, called a heat transfer fluid, through the collector for heating. The heated fluid then goes to a storage tank where it heats water. The hot water may then be piped to a faucet or showerhead. Most solar water heaters that operate in winter use a heat transfer fluid, similar to antifreeze, that will not freeze when the weather turns cold.

Today over 1.5 million homes in the U.S. use solar heaters to heat water for their homes or swimming pools.

5. Solar Electricity

Besides heating homes and water, solar energy also can be used to produce electricity. Two ways to generate electricity from solar energy are photovoltaics and solar thermal systems.

Photovoltaic Electricity

Photovoltaic comes from the words photo meaning "light" and volt, a measurement of electricity. Sometimes photovoltaic cells are called PV cells or solar cells for short. You are probably already familiar with solar cells. Solar-powered calculators, toys, and telephone call boxes all, use solar cells to convert light into electricity.

A photovoltaic cell is made of two thin slices of silicon sandwiched together and attached to metal wires. The top slice of silicon, called the N-layer, is very thin and has a chemical added to it that provides the layer with an excess of free electrons. The bottom slice, or P-layer, is much thicker and has a chemical added to it so that it has very few free electrons.

When the two layers are placed together, an interesting thing happens-an electric field is produced that prevents the electrons from traveling from the top layer to the bottom layer. This one-way junction with its electric field becomes the central part of the PV cell.

When the PV cell is exposed to sunlight, bundles of light energy known as photons can knock some of the electrons from the bottom P-layer out of their orbits through the electric field set up at the P-N junction and into the N-layer.

The N-layer, with its abundance of electrons, develops an excess of negatively charged electrons. This excess of electrons produces an electric force to push the additional electrons away. These excess electrons are pushed into the metal wire back to the bottom P-layer, which has lost some of its electrons.

This electrical current will continue flowing as long as radiant energy in the form of light strikes the cell and the pathway, or circuit, remains closed.

Current PV cell technology is not very efficient. Today's PV cells convert only about 10 to 14 percent of the radiant energy into electrical energy. Fossil fuel plants, on the other hand, convert from 30-40 percent of their fuel's chemical energy into electrical energy. The cost per kilowatt-hour to produce electricity from PV cells is presently three to four times as expensive as from conventional sources. However, PV cells make sense for many uses today, such as providing power in remote areas or other areas where electricity is difficult to provide. Scientists are researching ways to improve PV cell technology to make it more competitive with conventional sources.

Solar Thermal Electricity

Like solar cells, solar thermal systems use solar energy to make electricity. But as the name suggests, solar thermal systems use the sun's heat to do it.

Most solar thermal systems use solar collectors with mirrored surfaces to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver that heats a liquid. The super-heated liquid is used to make steam that drives a turbine to produce electricity in the same way that coal, oil, or nuclear power plants do.

Solar thermal systems may be one of three types: central receiver, dish, or trough. A central receiver system uses large mirrors on top of a high tower to reflect sunlight onto a receiver. This system has been dubbed a "solar power tower." Another system uses a dish-shaped solar collector to collect sunlight. This system resembles a television satellite dish. A third system uses mirrored troughs to collect sunlight. Until recently, trough systems seemed the most promising.

The world's first solar electric plant used mirrored troughs. LUZ, as the plant was called, was perfectly situated in the sunny Mojave desert of California. LUZ was the only solar plant to generate electricity economically. Dollar for dollar, it had always been cheaper to use conventional sources of energy (coal, oil, nuclear) to generate electricity. But the LUZ solar plant turned that around, producing electricity as cheaply as many new coal plants, and with no hidden pollution costs. The future looked bright for this pioneering solar plant and then the dream cracked. LUZ closed its doors at the end of 1992 because of a drop in oil prices and an over-budget construction project at LUZ's home-base.

LUZ may be gone, but most solar energy engineers believe solar power towers will be ready to take the place of trough systems very soon.

6. Solar Energy and the Environment

In the 1970s, the push for renewable energy sources was driven by oil shortages and price increases. Today, the push for renewable energy sources is driven by a renewed concern for the environment.

Solar energy is the prototype of an environmentally friendly energy source. It consumes none of our precious energy resources, makes no contribution to air, water, or noise pollution, does not pose a health hazard, and contributes no harmful waste products to the environment.

There are other advantages too. Solar energy cannot be embargoed or controlled by any one nation. And it will not run out until the sun goes out.