Solar Energy Facts

Since we are talking about the various advantages offered by solar energy, I thought I would write about some interesting solar energy facts that many people may be interested in knowing not.


This may further help in making you decide as to whether or not you should get solar panels installed in your house or not. If you would like to check out the various solar energy advantages that I wrote about in my previous posts, click on the link to check it out.



What can you do with Solar Energy?

• Because the utilization of solar energy does not release harmful gases such as sulphur-di-oxide or carbon-di-oxide, solar energy is good for the environment.
• Solar energy has a wide range of applications. Before the photovoltaic cell was invented, people used to dry their wet clothes by hanging them out in the sun. But, the photovoltaic cell is probably one of the best inventions that has completely taken the whole solar energy industry to a completely higher level. Other than that applications include the heating of water, generating electricity etc.
• Many outdoor swimming pools are warmed with the help of solar energy. That is one of the best uses. Also, one of the other most popular uses is probably the calculators which have for long been making use of solar energy. Many other small appliances similar to the calculator use solar energy instead of batteries. It is also used for lighting purposes as well.
• There has also been the ingenious invention of solar cookers which is basically a black box accompanied with a magnifying lens and coated with black colour on the inside so that the heat stays in and does not get reflected off. These sort of cookers are known to be very useful and have produced enough heat to cook rice and boil water and recently, even more than that.
• This is probably one industry that economists would love to study since the demand supply curve for this is way too steep. There are more people wanting these solar power products than there are manufacturers who are supplying these. This is also true not just for solar energy but also for renewable energy sources. Hence it is a big industry and the "industry of the future".

Solar Energy Facts – Measuring Units and Conversion

• Solar Energy is measured as Solar Power times the rate of conversion. Thus for all practical purposes, the basic unit used is kilowatt-hour. This is used rather than Joules because "Joules" is way too small a unit for all practical purposes when measuring solar energy.
• To give you an idea of how much a kilowatt-hour is worth, think of a 60 watt or 100 watt bulb and dive 1000 by that to get the number of hours that bulb will burn for.
• According to US Energy Information Administration's Statistics, "in 2008, the annual energy consumption by an average American household was 11,040kWh which is approximately 920kWh every month. Tennessee had the highest annual consumption at 15,624 kWh and Maine the lowest at 6,252 kWh."
  
• To get an idea of the amount of energy used for lighting, here's what EIA had to say,

"EIA estimates that in 2007, about 526 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity were used for lighting by the residential and commercial sectors.  This was equal to about 19% of the total electricity consumed by both of those sectors and 14% of total U.S. electricity consumption.

Residential lighting consumption was about 215 billion kWh, equal to about 15% of all residential electricity consumption. About 311 billion kWh was consumed for lighting by the commercial sector, which includes commercial and institutional buildings and public street and highway lighting, equal to 23% of commercial sector electricity consumption."

Solar Energy systems Facts:

• A solar system that one typically gets for residential purposes usually consists of solar panels, batteries, inverters, wiring and deep cycle battery tanks etc.
• If you want to know, how much does a home solar system panel cost? Then the answer would be anywhere between $5000 - $6000.
• For an approximately, 1 kilowatt-hour home solar panel, you would require probably around 100 square feet area for setting it up.
• The optimum time for direct sun shine on the panels would be from 10 AM – 2 PM. When the sun is shining outside, your hot water is practically free. And it can store up the energy for using it later on when you use it on cloudy days or during the night.
• The warranty that these solar panels come for is normally very high. They are available for almost around 20 years.
• It would be a good idea to have battery backup and you can go about in life just as normal since you can use everything just as normal for 24 hours a day even its bad weather outside.
  

Information about our Sun:

• Sun rays travel at the speed of light (approximately 3 * 10^8 meters per second) and reaches our earth in a little less than 8 minutes.

• Sun made life possible on the earth and it is because of that we have other energy sources that we use now such as coal and petroleum.

Miscellaneous Interesting Solar Energy Facts

• Various ancient Indian astronomers scientists like Da Vinci and Gallileo studied the sun and predicted the uses of solar energy in the future.
• The earth receives enough solar energy in a year to meet all the energy needs for the whole world in an entire year. Unfortunately, it is not being utilized efficiently.
  
• Various solar powered aircrafts have broken world records for flying large distances using just solar energy.
• Scientists are predicting solar flares from the sun spots in 2013 that could possibly cause a huge blackout and inflict heavy damages on the countries and their government. The earth's magnetic field is heavily influenced by that of the solar flares and studying space weather is becoming as important as predicting our daily weather. Scientists are predicting that any big disturbances in solar flares can cost a lot of money as the earth's entire magnetic field is affected by this. Our telecommunication and communication systems depend on the earth's magnetic field.
• It is predicted that coal and petroleum will last for only the next 40 years or so. After that we will all be using renewable sources of energy.