Electricity Fact Sheet
Solar Energy
The sun provides us with heat and light energy. The sun’s energy can be used to heat water for domestic use and leisure facilities, provide light and warm space inside buildings. Solar energy and shading are essential design elements for new building projects.
Solar power refers to the conversion of sunlight to electricity using photovoltaic cells. Solar cells are used in watches, calculators and other small electrical items, for Remote Area Power Supply (RAPS) applications and in a limited way, in the development of solar-powered vehicles.
A photovoltaic array is a linked collection of photovoltaic modules. Arrays such as this can be seen on rooftops and the energy produced supplements power taken from the grid. In remote areas, ground-mounted arrays of photovoltaic modules are more common. Many water, land and space craft use arrays to charge batteries.
A number of Solar Parks using photovoltaic arrays are already established, mainly in Europe. In a Solar Park at Pocking in Lower Bavaria, which generates 10MW, sheep are grazing under and around the 57,912 photovoltaic modules in testament to the integration of clean power generation with agriculture. Three large Solar Parks in Spain have a combined capacity of 64 MW.
Solar thermal technology uses heat directly from the sun. Huge solar thermal electric generating plants collect heat energy from the sun using reflectors in the form of troughs, dishes or towers to magnify the heat, which converts water to steam to drive turbines that produce electricity. There are solar thermal power stations in America and Spain.
Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) is the name given to nine solar thermal power plants in the Mojave Desert in California. The first of these parabolic trough power plants was built in 1984 and the ninth in 1991. The ‘trough’ collectors are large cylindrical mirrors that concentrate the sun’s heat energy. The combined capacity of the nine power plants is 354 MW, which feeds around 800 million kWh per year into the electricity grid.
The common garden clothes line dries clothes through the process of evaporation using natural solar and wind energy instead of the electricity used to power an indoor electric clothes dryer.
Source: Wikipedia ‘Renewable Energy’, taken from Greenpeace Energy 2008 ’World’s Largest photovoltaic power plants’.)
Paper by V Quaschning and M Blanco ‘Solar Power – Photovoltaic or Solar Thermal Power Plants?’ at the VGB Congress Power Plants 2001, Brussels, October 10-12, 2001.
Status Report on Solar Thermal Power Plants, Pilkington Solar International GmbH, Cologne, Germany 1996.
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