How does solar energy work?
Question:
Answer:
There are many ways to take advantage of the energy produced by the sun. A good place to start is with a passive solar energy water heater. They are inexpensive to install and easy to maintain. The simplest ones use the radiant energy of the sun and convert that to thermal energy using a material that absorbs the light instead of reflecting it, in layman's terms, something black.
Photovoltaic (solar cell) systems convert sunlight directly into electricity. A solar or Photovoltaic cell consists of semiconducting material that absorbs the sunlight. The solar energy knocks electrons loose from their atoms in a semiconductor, allowing the electrons to flow through the material to produce electricity.
For a more in-depth explanation of photovoltaic technology try this site.
the solar panels can store the suns energy in cells which get stored and a generator turns it into electricity. Or something like that.
When you're in the sun.
Basically, when light strikes the cell, a certain portion of it is absorbed within the semiconductor material. This means that the energy of the absorbed light is transferred to the semiconductor. The energy knocks electrons loose, allowing them to flow freely. PV cells also all have one or more electric fields that act to force electrons freed by light absorption to flow in a certain direction. This flow of electrons is a current, and by placing metal contacts on the top and bottom of the PV cell, we can draw that current off to use externally. For example, the current can power a calculator. This current, together with the cell's voltage (which is a result of its built-in electric field or fields), defines the power (or wattage) that the solar cell can produce.
something to do with sunshine being transferred to energy i think its probo a bit more complex than that but thats the basis and i got two points back for using some of my energy in answering your question ta
On Solar
It converts the heat from the sun to electricity
Well to begin with you should keep in mind that we use what is the outcome of our sun's "internal combustion".
Simply put the sun is a big ball of fission and fusion reactions constantly working that produce an immense amount of energy in the form of radiation and light. From what I can recall the sun burns up 5 million tons of matter a year. This is the reason it will burn up its hydrogen fuel in a couple of million years and become a white dwarf.
Now, we , on Earth, use the outcome of this Solar reaction by absorbing the heat produced. A solar panel is actually an amplifying set of mirrors that concentrates the sun's heat on to water, which turns to vapors and turns a small turbine.
However keep in mind that our ability to capture the suns energy is very limited and actually plants are much better at it. To power up a city the size of New York you would have to fill the rest of the planet with solar panels, not a very effective method now is it.
I cannot explain it all,but you can go to the website below.
Solar energy can be converted into electric energy because of the photo-electric effect.(Interesting bit of trivia: Einstein won his Nobel Prize for the photo=electric effect, not relativity.) A photon of light hitting the surface of something will impart some of its energy to that object. The most obvious effect is said object gets hotter. Different objects absorb the solar energy and can do different things to it, such as in the case of a solar cell, turn it into an electric current that can be used or stored.
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