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Solar Energy – An Alternate Source of Power Generation.
The movie “Race the Sun” staring James Belushi and Halley Berry, has for the first time introduced me to Solar Energy. It was a story about low- income and under achieving Hawaiian students encouraged by their teacher to join the Solar Car race. In the movie, a car shaped like a cockroach and covered with solar panels used the sun’s rays as an alternative energy source to run the car.
Solar energy is the light and the heat from the sun. Solar energy is not only a free source of energy, but its also unlimited in supply. There are no air and water pollution caused about by using solar energy. But there is still some impacts on the environment although indirect.
The use of solar power for homes for daylight systems are also being used to maximize the energy released by the sun. This system helps in replacing the artificial lighting, by providing internal illumination of homes. Daylight systems include sawtooth roofs, light shelf, skylights, and light tube. Daylight systems when they are properly implemented can reduce lighting-related energy consumption by 25 percent.
The conversion of solar energy into solar thermal technologies helps power for the purpose of heating water, space heating, space cooling and process heat generation. Solar energy can also be used to distil water and make saline or brackish water potable or drinkable.
Also sunlight can be converted into electricity using photovoltaics or PV. PV has been mainly used to power small and medium-sized things like a calculator powered by a single solar cell. There are homes powered by photovoltaics. Using solar energy for water and space heating is the most widely use application of solar energy. While ventilation and solar air heating is also growing in popularity.
Although there are lots of benefits for using solar energy, but solar energy efficiency still has some downside. In the absence of sun light, that is at night time this does not work. The benefits of setting up a solar power plant exceeds much more than the initial high cost of setting it up.