Monday, May 6, 2013
Here on Earth, solar energy is a primary source of a renewable energy. The amount of obtainable renewable energy sources around provides us the chance to make use of as well as to generate power through it, as from solar energy resources. The present renewable energy obtainable for worldwide consumption is about 84, 000 TW. Our sun generates around 400, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 watts of energy every second and it's thought that it can usually continue an additional 5 billion years.
Nowadays, there exist an extremely large variety of solar technologies,
and photovoltaics have
been gaining an increasing market share for the last 20 years. There are
two ways we can do to generate electricity from the solar energy :
1. Solar thermal
Solar Thermal electric energy
generation concentrates the light from the sun to generate heat from the
engine. There are few main parts in the process of electricity generation
with solar thermal :
concentrator, collector, working fluid, power conditioner, and storage. The
working fluid is heated by the concentrated sunlight in the form of oil or gas.
Photovoltaic or PV directly convert the sun’s light into electricity. This mean, energy will be produced during daylight where the sunlight available and at its maximum peak. Although the usage of electricity generated by PV can be consumed 24hours with the help of storage system, for large scale production, PV is less efficient than Solar Thermal.
In large scale production, solar thermal leads in terms of cost-effectiveness with low negative impact to the environmental. Currently, there are two methods for solar thermal collection :line focus and point focus. The different from both methods are the form of the infrastructure, line focus is parabola-shaped mirror which rotates on a single axis throughout the day tracking the sun, whereas, point focus requires a series of mirrors surrounding the tower that transfer the heat into more usable energy.