solar panel companies
Any companies that have solar panels?
A few months ago my dad said something about getting solar panels, and how green they were. I was just wondering if there were any companies that sold them and if they would actually make a big difference.
Lots of companies sell solar panels, even Home Depot and Lowe’s sell smaller ones. The problem is that they’re pretty limited right now due to the cost. Unless the cost of electricity skyrocketed, you’re unlikely to recover your investment thru savings on your bill. In Germany they’ve had much more widespread adoption of solar panels but only because their federal government subsidized the cost. At present solar cells (photovoltaic) are too expensive, they require a lot of care and use exotic metals, and it would take an awful lot of them to produce enough electricity for the average US home. They are handy for charging portable gadgets when you’re away from an outlet but it’s not yet viable for home use on it’s own. You’d still need to be hooked up to the grid or have a back-up power source for cloudy days and night-time, or banks of batteries or another storage method.
Pairing it with wind power makes some sense, but even so photovoltaic may not be the best way to go. Another technology is solar thermal which uses mirrors to focus sunlight on an overhead tube or pipe that is filled with a liquid. The concentrated sunlight makes that liquid boil and the steam is used to turn a small turbine to generate electricity. This can be much more efficient and also a lot less prone to damage or problems with scratched/dirty panels. At the moment I don’t know of anyone who is making these for home use but a couple of companies are building power plants in Nevada and other places using this technology. Hopefully in a year or two a home kit may be available.
You could probably design and build your own solar thermal plant using everyday materials since the materials are fairly basic, mirrors, tubing, a liquid (usually water) and so on. Some know-how or a good manual would be helpful but if you’re handy with machinery and tools it shouldn’t be too difficult. But the average home uses a lot of energy and even this would require a lot of roof-space. If you changed your home to run on LED lighting, got high-efficiency appliances and turned off devices that weren’t in use it would be easier to do.
New thin-film cells are better but still so costly that it would take decades to get your investment back in cost savings. It’s probably a bit too early for most people to install solar panels to power their homes but with more research and tax incentives that might change in the next few years. I expect solar thermal will become the dominant technology, since we lack enough exotic materials to make massive numbers of conventional photovoltaic cells.
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