How Do Solar Panels Convert Sunlight Into Electricity?

How do solar panels work?

Solar technology is very intriguing once you know how solar panels can transfer sunlight into electricity. If you take a solar panel apart piece by piece you will be equipped to distinguish each of the parts that we are going to talk about in this article. Possibly one day you will have to use what you learned to make your own personal solar panel.

In a nutshell, a solar cell is built up of several photo-voltaic cells. Each photo-voltaic cell is separated into two tiers. The two layers of the cell are generally known as P and N. The P layer is made to allow energy to flow to the N layer but energy from the N layer can't flow to the P layer. There is a brief gap between the two layers which stops energy from flowing in the reverse direction (from N to P).

The large majority of current day solar panels are made from silicon which has been chemically modified to absorb electricity far more successfully. Each photo-voltaic cell is made up of silicon. When sunlight hits the N layer of a photo-voltaic cell it will become charged but it can't preserve the charge so the electricity is quickly transmitted to the P layer of the photo-voltaic cell. The volume of electricity that is shifted at one time is generally around the 0.5 volt mark but there are methods to raise the amount of electricity each photo-voltaic cell generates. The electricity in the P layer is then transmitted to the main semi-conductor and the electricity passes to the solar panel's battery.

Green Energy

Solar cells are only equipped to convert about 1/16 of energy in sunlight. The explanation for that is because the sun's rays hardly ever shine straight on to the solar panels and most of the rays are reflected or soaked up into the surface of the solar panel. Based on calculations the maximum volume of energy that a solar panel can collect from sunlight is about 30%. Nevertheless, there are at present no solar panels on the market which are able to gather that much energy from sunlight. Standard solar panels are about 15% energy efficient. In other words, they can only transfer about 15% of the energy in the sun's rays.

Scientists are frequently looking for more ways to strengthen the energy efficiency of solar cells and there are a lot of different cells on the market today which are fairly energy efficient. Photo-voltaic cells can be built from a wide variety of various materials - even hair.

Solar Panels

Solar technology is in fact quite interesting and if you look at the background of solar technology and the speed at which we enhanced the technology you can estimate what the future will be like.

Solar panels will be set up on more and more houses until maybe one day we will no longer need to depend on company produced electricity and each home can supply the electricity it requires entirely from solar panels. Solar panels these days are reasonably cheap and you can use them to power small