Solar Energy: There Are A Few Important Things You Need To Know Before Building Solar Panels

So, you have decided to create your own solar energy generator to cut bills or have a healthier source of energy for your home. Before you start working on something you need to know how it works.

Solar energy is created by sun rays that reach our planet in just a few minutes after they leave the Sun's surface covering the distance of 93 million miles in a few minutes. After all, light is traveling with the speed of light. The atmosphere absorbs most of this energy and one third of the sunlight is reflected back into space. What remains is what we may use to create energy.

Did you know that the largest solar battery on our planet is Earth itself? It can absorb about 174,000 billion kilowatts (kW) from the Sun every hour of the day? All in all, at this step of your "adventure" you should know that the light produced on one square meter during a clear summer noon, is worth about 1000 watts.

Unfortunately, most of this energy goes to waste. The amount of energy that doesn't go to waste generates the winds and helps sustain life. Plants use it to generate oxygen, animals and humans need it to strengthen their organisms.

However, we have reached that moment in our evolution to be able to gather more energy from the sun. You must know that the types of solar energy are direct or indirect, active or passive.

Direct solar energy is created when sunlight is striking a solar cell directly and electricity is generated instantly. It directly transforms, without any intermediate process.

On the other hand, indirect solar energy requires one supplementary step to transform sunlight into usable energy. It is the case of hydroelectric dams and wind turbines, transforming solar-caused wind, rain and other climatic interactions into power.

We can transform sunlight into another type of energy by:

Solar thermal processes: Sun energy is transformed into heat. During this process, the sun's heat is collected by solar panels which then heat water which can be used to heat buildings. The solar panels are always put on the roof or in a place where they have a lot of sunlight, and are introduced afterwards into a system of tubes called "thermal collectors" to the heating source.

Photovoltaic processes: Unlike the solar thermal systems, through this process, photovoltaic cells absorb the sun's light and not its warmth, so sunlight is transformed into electricity. They are regarded as the future of power generating technologies and are often silicon-based pieces of material. Solar panels are made of many of such cells, put together.