Every square metre of planet Earth receives around 1,366 watts of direct solar radiation.
Solar power is a highly reliable energy source and our ability to harvest it is dependent on just technology and location. Solar technology is developing fast, with new breakthroughs each year: higher efficiencies, lower cost, easier installations. It’s exciting to be a part of this technological, green movement.
Solar power uses the natural energy of the sun to produce electricity. It is sustainable and renewable.
Traditional energy sources, including coal, natural gas, and oil, are finite and are all predicted to eventually run out, some much earlier than others. On the other hand, the sun will burn out in about five billion years. Until then, it makes sense to harvest this clean, abundant energy.
The burning of coal, oil, and natural gas for electricity produces harmful emissions including carbon dioxide (a major contributor to global warming), carbon monoxide, particulate matter, heavy metals such as lead and mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Solar power serves as an alternative to these non-renewable resources.
Solar produces zero carbon emissions and reduces dependence on fossil fuels.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that electricity generation is currently the largest industrial source of air emissions in the United States. Fossil fuel-fired power plants are responsible for 40 percent of man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, 23 percent of the America’s nitrogen oxide (NOX) emissions, and 67 percent of sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions. These emissions contribute to the formation of smog and haze, and are associated with a wide range of health problems. In addition, greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon dioxide) emitted by fossil fuel-fired power plants increase the risk of climate change. In comparison, the emissions from solar electricity generation are negligible as no fossil fuels are combusted to create electricity.
Another cool fact about solar power is that it does not create any noise pollution. So your fuel will never run out, make industrial sound or produce emissions – which are all qualities we currently experience with gas, oil and coal.
You might have heard that manufacturing solar panels produces a lot of emissions and therefore negates all the clean energy panels produce in their lifetime, but this is false. While the production process does produce emissions, after operating for a certain amount of time, solar installations produce enough clean, renewable energy to ‘cover’ any pollution during the manufacturing process several times over.
It takes about two to five years for a solar panel to “pay back” the energy that went into making them (depending on how sunny it is where you live). This includes the energy needed to mine the silicon and process it into a solar cell, and also make the aluminium frame and glass in the panel module housing. Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust (second to oxygen in the silicon dioxide that makes up sand and quartz), so there will not be any material shortages in the foreseeable future.
Pollution can block the sun’s rays and stop them from reaching the Earth, so theoretically, the more we switch over to solar power and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the greater the amount of sun that can reach the earth to be harnessed for solar energy.
The sun’s energy is the most sustainable resource we have, the sun should be around for another 5 billion years.