Solar power is arguably the cleanest, most reliable form of renewable energy available, and it can be used in several forms to help power your home or business. Solar-powered photovoltaic (PV) panels convert the sun's rays into electricity by exciting electrons in silicon cells using the photons of light from the sun. This electricity can then be used to supply renewable energy to your home or business.
To understand this process further, let’s look at the solar energy components that make up a complete solar power system.
In most solar systems, solar panels are placed on the roof. An ideal site will have no shade on the panels, especially during the prime sunlight hours of 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.; a south-facing installation will usually provide the optimum potential for your system, but other orientations may provide sufficient production. Trees or other factors that cause shading during the day will cause significant decreases to power production. The importance of shading and efficiency cannot be overstated. In a solar panel, if even just one of its 36 cells is shaded, power production will be reduced by more than half. Experienced installation contractors such as NW Wind & Solar use a device called a Solar Pathfinder to carefully identify potential areas of shading prior to installation.
click her
The solar power tower, also known as 'central tower' power plants or 'heliostat' power plants or power towers, is a type of solar furnace using a tower to receive the focused sunlight. It uses an array of flat, movable mirrors (called heliostats) to focus the sun's rays upon a collector tower (the target). Concentrated solar thermal is seen as one viable solution for renewable, pollution-free energy.
Design
- Some concentrating solar power towers are air-cooled instead of water-cooled, to avoid using limited desert water
- Flat glass is used instead of the more expensive curved glass
- Thermal storage to store the heat in molten salt containers to continue producing electricity while the sun is not shining
- Steam is heated to 500 °C to drive turbines that are coupled to generators which produce electricity
- Control systems to supervise and control all the plant activity including the heliostat array positions, alarms, other data acquisition and communication
plats
