News about Solar, Wind and alternative green power technologies

In the morning as you walk along the road, the shining rays of the sun represent an astronomical source of energy that is under-utilized. There are few who even think about the sun as energy. Energy that provides electricity for home users, to drive cars, to light up shopping complex and more or less everything that we know has always been just in front of our eyes.

Setting a better scale for comparison

The energy that the sun is actually providing and has provided to earth since its million years of existence is the source to all living organisms. For instance, natural energy provided by the sun is being consumed by the world, by plants and animals. However, humans are using solar energy to a certain extent, for both energy purposes and medical properties such as vitamin D.

However, getting to the point, solar energy is under-utilized by human beings. There is still an over dependence on technology that emits a large amount of greenhouse gases. A shift to solar energy isn’t a better system to trade with nature but rather a step towards sustainable source of energy.

The potential energy that can be harnessed by the sun is unimaginable. It is a type of energy that can be collected from anywhere on the planet as well as ‘outside in space’. The density of energy that can be gathered through solar energy is relatively low. This bottleneck gives rise to a need of large areas to set up solar panels.

Solar technology is expensive and relatively very much less effective than other conventional sources of energy. This is what refrains solar energy to become a major global supplier of energy.

Turning solar energy to cheaper solutions as well as ones that are more efficient will likely boost its abundance. Major government initiatives aim at subsiding solar energy installation yet the answer to make solar energy more widely used is in the technology.

Research in the field of molecular-scale material, high performance organic photovoltaic cells, plasmonic photovoltaic, nanostructure and photosynthetic bioelectricity are all fields of technology that need more attention to leverage the support of solar energy.

Academic bodies as well as private companies are steadily moving in the right direction. Solar technology to harness energy is growing across various ‘regions of the world’.

Source: Stanford University