Solar energy is by far the largest resource from all renewable energy sources.
The sunlight that strikes the earth in 1 hour (4.3 x 1020 J) is more than the energy consumed on the entire planet in 1 year (Lewis and Nocera 2006). The world’s solar photovoltac market is one with the fastest growth. It has experienced about 50% annual growth rate over the past five years (Smesta and Lampert 2007, IEA 2015) with roughly 67 GW of installed solar PV capacity at the end of 2011 (IEA 2015). However, even if this numbers seemed to be encouraging, of the world’s energy supply only 0.3% was produced from solar thermal energy and less than 0.05% was produced by solar photovoltaics during 2005 (IEA 2008b) and nowadays accounts for less than one percent of the total yearly electricity production (IEA 2015). Interestingly, Germany is at the moment the market leader in installing photovoltaic systems, it holds the lead as the country that uses most solar panels and produces about half of the total world’s solar electricity (Semanova et al 2007), in spite of Germany having much lesser sunny days than southern countries.
2.3.1 Advantages of Solar Power
Solar energy is completely renewable, it is a constant and it is a consistent power source (the sun is always shining somewhere on earth). The main environmental benefit of generating power from the sun is the significant reduction in air emissions of green house gases (GHG) and other toxic particulates. Solar energy production generates no waste from every day operations.
In contrast to wind power, solar cells and panels make absolutely no noise at all while producing electricity, as they have no moving parts. They are practically maintenance free and will last for decades. Solar panels are telecommunication stations, to increase safe medical care, e.g. cold storage for vaccines and to power other medical devices, and for providing light during night time (Okoro and Madueme 2006).
2.3.2 Disadvantages of Solar Power
The main disadvantage is consistency and reliability. Solar power cannot be exploited during the night or on a cloudy day or a storm. That is the main reason it cannot be used as the only source of energy, it must be complemented with several different sources. At the moment the solar cells and panels tend to be very expensive. And with 95% of the manufacturing industry for solar panels based on silicon, the shortage of silicon feedstock threatens to stall the growth of this industry (Smestad and Lampert 2007).
When comparing solar energy systems with current nuclear and fossil energy production, large solar power production may initially cause more GHG and environmental degradation, as the production of solar technologies involves hazardous substances (Bezdek 1993). Large solar power stations also require a significant land area to operate. Finally, technology in solar panels changes rapidly, with new cost and energy efficient panels being built, so incentives to adopt the current technology are small.
2.3.3 Solar Power Technologies
The most common solar power technologies currently employed for the conversion of sunlight into electricity are photovoltaics (PV) and concentrated solar energy. Nevertheless there exist other solar technologies which make use of the solar energy’s thermal property. Some of these technologies are: solar lighting and passive solar building design, solar water heating, solar water treatment, solar cooking, and other solar thermal processes such as water evaporation and disinfection.
2.3.3.1 Photovoltaics
A photovoltaic cell (PV), or solar cell, consists of a thin wafer of silicon or some other material usually assembled on panels for the conversion of light into electricity using the photoelectric effect. The silicon cell, or some other material, emits electrons when struck by sunlight. These electrons liberated from the material then flow out of the wafer forming a direct electric current (Chiras 2001). Materials presently used in solar cells include amorphous silicon, polycrystalline silicon, micro-crystalline silicon, cadmium telluride, and copper indium selenide/sulfide (Jacobson 2009). Confirmed terrestrial solar cell module efficiencies at 25 °C are in the range of 10% to 30% (Green et al 2010), with the commercial solar cells at around 20%.
2.3.3.1 Concentrated Solar Power (CSP)
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is a technology that makes use of lenses or mirrors and tracking systems to focus, or concentrate, a large area of sunlight into a small beam in order to heat a fluid in a collector at high temperature. The fluid in CSP can be pressurised steam, synthetic oil, or molten salt. The heated fluid then flows from the collector into a heat engine which drives turbines to generate electricity by conventional means. Usually, up to 30% of this thermal energy is converted to electricity (Jacobson 2009).
2.3.4 Micro Solar Photovoltaic Systems
Applications of solar photovoltaic systems (PV) are becoming widespread in developed and developing countries. Solar systems may appear in paper to be strong candidates for renewable energy generation. However, the amount of power generated by a PV system depends on the availability of solar insolation.
The efficiency of a solar system is also influenced by a number of factors and the technical information provided by manufacturers at standard test conditions may never occur in practice.
There exist vast literature available on the economics of photovoltaics in residential households (i.e. Lazou and Papatsoris 2000), as well as on empirical data of energy payback for photovoltaic systems (Knapp and Jester 2001).
(Crystalline silicon modules achieve an energy break-even in 3 to 4 years).
However, this data comes from well designed photovoltaics systems in which many variables involved are carefully, and even sometimes meticulously, planned. For the regular household, mere calculations about the panel ratings and energy needs according to specific devices may become troublesome. But solar photovoltaic systems should not be that complicated. What about if for the regular person having a façade facing south (in the northern hemisphere) could simply tilt an array of solar panels, connect the cables to a battery and be able to charge his or her portable devices. This investigation will also try to embark into this issue with an empirical case study.