Solar power seems like the answer to everything, doesn’t it? Solar is cheap, clean, and sustainable– but, like, what’s it all about? In this series, we’re going to explain it to you.
See, out there in space, some 93 million miles away, there is a giant, nuclear explosion that’s been burning for billions of years, blasting light and energy in every direction– and a whole lot of that energy reaches us here, on Earth. Like, a whole lot. So much, you guys– like, enough to have fed all the plants and animals on the planet billions of times over … and it’s not going to run out any time soon. What’s more, we can harness that energy. When the sun shines, we can turn that sunshine into cheap, clean electricity, and store it in batteries for later, when the sun isn’t shining.
All of which kind of begs the question: why aren’t we doing that?
START AT THE BEGINNING
We can sit here and talk about the various conspiracies and machinations and special interests and generally bad people who are “holding back” solar as a mainstream energy source literally all day– and we will.
Before we do that, though, we should make sure that we all understand what we mean by “solar power” as it exists today. So, let’s talk about what solar power is, and how it works.
DEFINITIONS
In the broadest sense, solar power is the energy that comes from the sun, and can refer to either the heat or light energy we get from the sun, or– sometimes– both the heat and light energy.
For the most part, though, when we think of “solar power” from a clean tech perspective, we tend to think of technology that converts sunlight into electricity. This usually takes the shape of solar “panels” which are made up of a number of photovoltaic “cells” that convert the energy from that light into electricity.
To understand how that conversion happens, we can look to the word itself: photovoltaic. “Photo” comes from the Greek word for light, which is where “photon,” the same given to a single particle of light– “voltaic,” meanwhile, comes from “volt,” the SI unit of electrical force first described by Alessandro Volta, who the unit is named for. To say that something is photovoltaic, then, is to say that that thing turns light (a photon) into electricity (voltage).
That “photovoltaic effect” happens on an atomic level. That means that when a super-tiny photon hits an atom in just the right way, the atom absorbs a photon and releases (or, “sheds”) an electron. The movement of electrons is— you guessed it!— electricity.
FunFact: The photoelectric effect was first observed by a French physicist you’ve probably …….
Source: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/05/17/how-solar-power-works-what-is-solar-power/