When turning on the lamp at home, humans do not often think about how the electricity for it was produced and what suffered from it. Of course, there is enough energy resources for our life. Yet what’s next? Coal, oil and natural gas (raw materials to produce electricity) run out. Atomic stations? They’re dangerous. HPP? You can’t sink everything in water storages. Thermal, tidal and other stations give miser of electricity. Wind generators? They’re expensive. So where is our solution?
We’ve got a huge storage of energy above our heads! The only thing we need to do is to learn to take it properly.
It’s all about Sun – the closest star to us. As the scientists say, the Sun will shine during five billion years! Technically, there are no problems with transforming the solar light into electricity. There are several ways to do that. The most widespread way is installing the solar panels on the land’s surface. When being lightened by the sunrays, these panels “produce” electricity by transforming warmth.
More complicated way: they use numerous parabolic specular panels installed around the tower with a height up to 250 meters. Light rays reflected from mirror panels are focused on the top of the tower. They heat up the heat carrier placed there. Overheated steam is transferred to the engine, which makes the electricity generator work.
Essay: Solar Energy Weaknesses
The greatest lack of such tower-typed solar stations is their complicity and expensiveness (powerful electronic equipment is required to properly control heliostats). Heliostats themselves need lots of territory. For instance, solar station with 100 megawatts of power produced will require 200 hectares of working surface. To compare, atomic station with 1000 megawatts needs only 50 hectares of territory. Electricity production with photoelement panels needs finding lots of surface for them, too. Plus, usual photoelements in panels are expensive and fragile yet.
But we forget about one very important thing. There are 20 million square kilometers of deserts on our planet. If solar electricity stations will work on 10% of productive effectiveness, that’s enough to cover only one percent of deserts with solar panels and they’ll produce today’s amount of electric power consumed in the whole World! In other words, all the rest of electric stations will become unneeded, and we could close them totally.
SE Complicity Essay Arguments
Progress? Yes, of course. Yet nowadays everything depends on a price of solar electricity. To make your house totally autonomic, you’ll need to pay lots of money at once – the solar electricity system is expensive. Despite the price of such electricity will bring the whole amount of spent costs back in some years, not everyone can allow themselves to find a significant budget to install a system.
But is this light worth the game? It is. The “traditional” electricity bills grow with the raw prices rising up. Autonomic solar stations are already being produced.
They work in more powerful variations, too. For instance, there are quite big SE stations working on Crimean Peninsula (the first of them had 5 megawatts of power). It’s a pity, but the development of them is being hold up by the expensiveness of the equipment for SE stations.
But this trouble is being solved actively for a long time. In 1996 in California, they started to use tower-typed SE station “Solar Two” with 10 megawatts of power. It has one important feature: sun warmth is preserved in a melted salt for a long time; that is why this station can produce electricity around the clock, not only during the light day.
Based on “Solar Two” project, there are plans to build SE stations with up to 200 megawatts of power.
Essay on SE
One more dash forward in solar energy industry happened when the American company “V3Solar” presented conic & rotating photoelectric devices they called “V3 Spin Cellos”. These devices are true revolution in the industry, because of taking a small territory to function but giving 20 times more electricity with a price of $0,08 for kilowatt-hour. To compare: average cost of usual SE stations electricity in USA - $0.28 for kw-hr.
But this is not all miracles from the United States. Scientists from California Institute of Technology developed a new type of photoelements in a shape of thin micro rods, placed on a substrate very close to each other. This allowed to seriously increase the effectiveness of such panels, as they are more sensitive and can produce electricity even when the light is weak.
Additionally, they use only one percent of high-priced semiconductor materials compared with “Regular” panels. Plus, it is possible to use micro-rod devices even in locations where daylight hours are short.
Interesting fact: after these revolutionist inventions, USA dared to reach the level of solar energy production to 7 gigawatts yearly.
And the last miracle in the branch of solar energy production: flexible plates of cheap photoelements. They use glue to assemble those plates. You can roll up such plates to transport them, that’s very comfortable. Yet what’s the most important: durability of these products increased 5 times higher. And since it’s a module construction type which is used in SE station building projects, there are no obstacles to increase their power by placing more panels to work on the station.
You can place these plates wherever you want and however you want. I guess, the future of our civilization belongs to solar energy. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky – Soviet rocket scientist – once said humans to be the children of the Sun. Maybe, he was more than right, don’t you think?