Introduction of solar energy

We are like tenant farmers cutting the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy: sun, wind and tide… I would bet my money on sun and solar power. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before tackling that–Thomas Alva Edison

What an advanced scientist he was! Certainly, sunrise and sunset are one of the most beautiful scenes you have ever seen with your lovely eyes, and I bet you will never get bored of watching them over and over again every day at sunrise and sunset. The sun is now beyond beauty because scientists have exploited the invisible sunlight to create a dependent alternative energy source “Solar Power” to serve the human species and provide them with a better world to live in.

“Green world” is now like a buzz word in today’s world. Now we are very worried about our future. Renewable energies like solar power, hydropower, wind power, geothermal power, biomass, and tidal power are all God-gifted resources, and by utilizing them, we can lead ourselves to a green world.

For a layman, solar energy can be labeled as “Solar energy is energy produced by the sun in the form of light.” But if you want to go deeper, then for your better understanding the explanation would be like this: “There is a continuous reaction in the sun; this reaction is called fusion (joining two small atoms to form one big atom); in the sun, two hydrogen atoms come together and form a new helium atom, but during the conversion process, the weight of helium is somewhat less than that of hydrogen; this lost matter is the energy that reaches Earth through electromagnetic waves, and we all call it sunlight.” According to scientists, every second, 600 million tons of hydrogen are converted to helium, and 89,000 terawatts of energy eventually reach the Earth’s surface. This is 59,000 times more than our consumption, which is 15 terawatts. So all we have to do is harness this radiant energy as much as possible.

The best-known way to harness this energy so far is photovoltaic (PV) cells. The science behind the phenomenon of harnessing electricity from sunlight is called the photoelectric effect, which was discovered in 1839 by a French physicist named Edmond Becquerel, and later, Sir Albert Einstein was awarded a Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect in 1905. In fact, the photoelectric effect is not a difficult term to understand. Material such as silicon shows the photoelectric effect. When sunlight contains photons that strike the surface of a solar panel that is made of specially treated silicon, electrons are released from the silicon; this is the photoelectric effect, and we all know that electricity is nothing more than a flow of electrons.

Some photovoltaic cells form a photovoltaic module. The first photovoltaic module was invented by Bell Laboratories (present name Lucent) in 1954, but it was too expensive to use largely because it had low efficiency. MIT did research on solar power in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s and became a commercial success. Later, spaceships used solar power; they improved the technology and eventually we now have a cost 100 times less than in the 1970s.

Nowadays, solar energy is very popular all over the world. It is considered a probable solution to the green world. You can also participate in the campaign using solar energy. We all need to be kind to planet Earth as much as possible.