Use Solar Energy To Reduce Utility Bills

If you were planning to use solar power to save on your utility bills, the truth is that to buy solar panels would cost you a few thousand dollars at least and with an initial investment of so much money, it would take you a long time to get the money back from the savings on your utility bills. Solar panels are a major part of your solar power system. If, on the other hand, you were to build your own solar panels than you would be on the right track. You can save money with a smaller initial investment and see the returns very quickly.

To build your own solar panel you will need a few hundred dollars for the parts and a good manual to show you how to do it. But you don’t need is any special skills or experience, a good manual, all the parts and some spare time, you are set to go.

While it is very realistic to save money, however don’t think that you will make enough electricity for all of your needs or that you’ll make enough to sell back to the utility company. But you can make enough to make a large impact on your utility costs every year.

Of course, the more sunny days you get in your area, the more a solar panel will work for you. If you want to mount the panels (s) on your roof just make sure that your roof gets full sun. You can mount the panels just above ground too.

A solar panel is basically a large box that holds the solar cells. The panel is covered with Plexiglas or regular glass to protect the solar cells from damage. While it is possible to make your own solar cells at home, most homeowners would be better off buying the solar cells and building the panel themselves. This is the most cost effective method since building the solar cells can be difficult.

So, get going now and use solar energy to reduce on your home energy utility bills, go green, and have some unique bragging rights with your friends.

College of Illinois Scientists Show Us Little Known Approaches to Produce More Economical Pv panels

* Another guest article…

While silicon is actually the market normal semiconductor in most electronic devices, which includes the solar cells that pv panels use to convert sun rays into energy, it is not really the most cost-efficient product available. For example, the semiconductor gallium arsenide and associated substance semiconductors give nearly two times the performance as silicon in photo voltaic units, however they are rarely utilized in utility-scale applications mainly because of their excessive manufacturing cost.

U. of Illinois. (http://illinois.edu/) teachers J. Rogers and X. Li researched lower-cost methods to produce thin films of gallium arsenide which also allowed adaptability in the sorts of products they can be integrated into.

If you can lower significantly the price of gallium arsenide and some other compound semiconductors, then you could develop their variety of applications.

Usually, gallium arsenide is transferred in a individual thin layer on a smaller wafer. Either the desired unit is made right on the wafer, or the semiconductor-coated wafer is break up into chips of the preferred dimension. The Illinois team chose to put in several layers of the material on a simple wafer, making a layered, “pancake” stack of gallium arsenide thin films.

If you grow 10 levels in 1 growth, you only have to fill the wafer a single time. If you do this in 10 growths, loading and unloading with temp ramp-up as well as ramp-down get a lot of time. If you consider exactly what is needed for each growth – the equipment, the procedure, the time, the people – the overhead saving this approach offers is a substantial cost decrease.

Next the researchers independently peel off the levels and shift them. To achieve this, the stacks alternate layers of aluminum arsenide with the gallium arsenide. Bathing the stacks in a solution of acid and an oxidizing agent dissolves the layers of aluminum arsenide, freeing the individual small sheets of gallium arsenide. A soft stamp-like system selects up the layers, 1 at a time from the top down, for exchange to one more substrate – glass, plastic or silicon, depending on the application. After that the wafer can be used again for one more growth.

By executing this it’s possible to generate much more material more fast and more price effectively. This process could generate mass amounts of material, as opposed to merely the thin single-layer way in which it is generally grown.

Freeing the material from the wafer additionally opens the opportunity of flexible, thin-film electronics made with gallium arsenide or different high-speed semiconductors. To make devices which could conform but still keep higher performance, that’s considerable.

In a document released on-line May twenty in the magazine Nature (http://www.nature.com/), the group describes its techniques and displays three kinds of devices utilizing gallium arsenide chips made in multilayer stacks: light units, high-speed transistors and photo voltaic cells. The authors additionally offer a comprehensive price comparability.

An additional benefit of the multilayer technique is the release from area constraints, particularly important for solar cells. As the layers are removed from the stack, they could be laid out side-by-side on an additional substrate in order to generate a much greater surface area, whereas the standard single-layer procedure limits area to the dimension of the wafer.

For photovoltaics, you want large area coverage to get as much sunshine as possible. In an extreme situation we may develop sufficient layers to have ten times the area of the conventional.

After that, the team programs to explore more possible product applications and other semiconductor resources that could adapt to multilayer growth.

About the Author – Shannon Combs gives advice for the residential solar power grants weblog, her personal hobby weblog focused on recommendations to assist home owners to conserve energy with solar power.

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Solar Power -The Future Energy For The Home

Solar energy for residential houses is nothing new. When man first started building homes, sunlight played an influence in the design. As a matter of fact, for the Ancient Chinese and Greeks, the orientation of the buildings is directed towards where it could capture the most sunlight.

The ancients might not be as intellectually sophisticated then to use catch phrases as passive solar and thermal mass but when they build, they were building in compact proportion, employing overhangs, and building in manners that direct the airflow within the structure and producing well lit, well ventilated spaces using the relative position of the sun to the orientation of their structures.

Nowadays, with the conventional sources of energy became more expensive, homeowners are once again turning to the sun for energy requirements.

Since the fifties, harnessing the sun’s rays has been evolving and today the solar cell technology has achieved very efficient levels that modern (so-called green house) designs implement the sun’s power to provide energy for the home.

Although solar energy is free, the device that will convert it to run our appliances is not. To provide solar energy for the home, solar cells called photovoltaic made from semi-conducting materials to produce electricity. To heat water, a systems generally composed of solar thermal collectors is use.

These solar panels are mounted on rooftops, yards or open spaces where it can capture the maximum amount of sunlight. Whenever possible, the panels were installed facing south to get the most out of the sunlight.

In spite of all the development in solar energy, the use of this technology is not enough to provide power to the whole house. The best method so far can only fulfill about 80% of a households power needs. The employment of solar energy for the home will still require the use of the conventional power distribution method.

Powering the homes by solar means will still, for a while be augmented by a local power distribution agency. To many, this is already a good starting point. Homeowners that feel that the high cost of powering their houses through solar power, is justified when compared to the price that is now being paid for conventional method where horrendous amounts of CO2 are being dumped into the atmosphere just to generate a pitiful amount of electricity.

However, due in part to the rising costs of energy, the technology for solar energy has been undergoing rapid phases of development. Experts are confident that powering the home through the solar method will be made widely available for those who prefer it as its sole energy source.

World’s Largest Solar Plant to be Build In Ordos, China

Arizona-based First Solar plans to construct the world’s largest solar plant in Ordos, China. When finished in 2019, the 2,000 megawatt Ordos solar farm will produce enough power to provide for 3 million homes. It’s a development that makes China, one of the biggest players in the solar energy game.

The Ordos solar farm is an especially big – the 25 square mile, multi-billion dollar plant makes other solar projects look petite by comparison. The Ordos Solar Plant, which is scheduled to begin the first of its four phases of construction in 2010, when completed. it could easily become the world’s biggest renewable energy consumer. read more here

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