Solar Energy Is Now

What is considered the Holy Grail today? I am not talking in the religious sense, I am talking about something that is wanted by most of industry and even by consumers. It happens to be free, or cheap energy. For years we have been told that our oil supplies are about to run out, but unfortunately this is just for consumption. Those in the know, realize that there are many countries in this world and many locations under the sea that have not been explored yet. The way that supply and demand works is that the less you have of a desirable item, the more you can charge for it. Making people think that an item is about to be depleted, because companies are using business practices to hide the fact that this is not imminent works also.

The Sun
Photo Source: Stocktaking

We keep talking about alternate energy, but many of the big oil companies are buying into that field. Will they be able to control prices there also? I don't know about you, but when I see all these different oil companies charging about the same price, more or less, I can't help but feel that there is dirty dealing going on here. I think it is obvious, but not punished because of the huge amounts of cash that these companies control. They know how to spend some of it too. Just look at the oil lobby that contributes so much money to every campaign and you will realize why nothing is done to stop this price fixing. The money that is given to campaigns is probably not the only oil money finding its way into the hands of the politicians, as they say, money talks and huge amounts of money makes a lot of noise.

The strange thing about all this is that we have way more energy than we need. No I am not crazy. The Sun puts more energy on the earth in an hour than everyone on the earth would use in a year, it is just a matter of figuring out how to capture and store it. This is where the holy grail lies. If all the money that was used to research better forms of energy was put into this area, instead of spread all over the lot, we would probably be much better off. All the sun's energy is not in the form of visible light. Some of it is in the form of heat and infrared light. Have you ever walked on hot sands at the beach and burned your feet? That is because the sand is capturing the heat from the sun's ray. One thing that we might be able to do is turn some of these desert areas into energy collection areas.

Traditional Solar Cells
Photo Source: Stock.xching

I can not take credit for this though, it has been known about for quite some time and as a matter of fact, it was mentioned at the Athens Summit of 2009. The title of the talk was, “Desert Heat Collection and Conversion into Electricity”, by Mr. Muftah Elarbash, M.Sc., PE, Senior Environmental Consultant,Executive Director, Waves Environmental Co. Ltd., Tajura, Tripoli, Libya. All this has been known about, but seldom mentioned. The deserts in many different countries, far from just being waste lands could become very productive areas. They would suddenly become a vital source of heat to be used to create electricity along with other technologies that exit for converting sunlight to electricity.

One method that we use to do this is to aim mirrors at a tank full of water, changing the water into steam and using that steam to power a turbine. I am not so sure about this method. It doesn't look that efficient to me, since it requires a lot of area to mount many mirrors in. If it could be improved by perhaps using a laser, powered by converted sunlight to heat the water then I believe it would be more efficient. The problem is that the amount of energy going into the laser would have to be far less than what we would be getting out in electricity, or it would not be worth trying. Some might say that this isn't true in this case because the main thing is to use less land area to heat the water and if we are using sunlight converted to electricity then who cares how much we use to power the laser? They are forgetting one thing, if we are using more power than we are getting, why use the laser at all, we could just take this power directly.

A Simple Solar Oven
Photo Source: Stock.xching

Solar panels were just not efficient enough. The best most expensive ones could give back about 40% in energy. Since the price was so prohibitive, it didn't pay for the homeowner to even think about using them, but there has been a breakthrough, a much cheaper panel that can give back up to 80% of what it takes in, in the form of electricity. It comes from the Idaho National Laboratories. How was this done? How could solar panels get cheaper and twice as efficient as the best ones? The answer is that it was accomplished using nanotechnology. The cells had printed nano scale antennae and these antennae capture infrared radiation. Guess what, this radiation is also available at night which means the cells work 24 hours a day. Why don't we have these being used yet? The hitch is that while all this energy hits the cells, scientists are still working on a method of saving it. Scientists are thinking about putting a nanoscale capacitor or AC/DC converter in the center of every tiny antenna and they believe that they can do this without raising the price. The efficiency will be slightly lowered, but not very much.

The key word in the above paragraph was “printed”. These solar cells are printed and this is why they are so cheap. A few years back it was discovered that circuits could actually be printed on paper. This technique may find its way into other electronics in the future. Here is a question I would like to know the answer to, if we have gotten this far in converting sunlight, could this technology alone replace the power grid someday? I ask this because it has been the dream of many homeowners to be able to get off of the power grid. Think of it, a home that can generate electricity just from its roof panels in sufficient amount to run the home. It would eliminate the security risk that the power grid provides. Today the power grid is one of the most vulnerable things in this country. Knock it out and everything comes to a halt. This would not be the case however, if every building had its own electrical source.