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Wind Energy: The Way Forward for Clean Energy

The growing need for clean, renewable energy sources has been a concern for many years. New technological developments in wind energy systems and increasing problems with our current power plants can only lead to the conclusion that clean alternative energy must be the way for the future.

Problems with Existing Energy Sources

Most of our energy is currently created using coal, gas, oil or nuclear power. These methods damage the environment and use huge amounts of water in the production process. With many areas suffering critical drought and low water tables, water needs to be conserved and used as efficiently as possible.

The United States imports more gas and oil than any other nation. Many of its suppliers are in troubled and unstable areas. Placing the nation at the mercy of these countries by being dependent upon them for essential power has many undesirable political and social repercussions. Being self-sufficient as a nation by generating wind power energy locally can significantly contribute to the security of the nation.

The Pros of Wind Energy

Wind energy creates electricity from the wind, so that it can be used as a power source. Spinning wind turbine blades rotate with the wind to turn a generator and the energy of motion is converted into electricity. A concentration of these wind turbines placed together is called a “wind farm.” Unlike traditional energy production, wind power energy can be produced and consumed in dry areas and in times of drought, conserving water for other essential uses.

Wind power is known to have little or no damaging effect on the environment compared to other energy sources. Emissions are negligible as no fuel is combusted. The mass production of clean energy using wind power has the potential to reduce global warming. It can reduce pollution known to cause acid rain, smog, haze and the high mercury contamination currently found in our water supply.

wind farm

Wind farms can be located offshore or on land, and the land can still be used for grazing livestock or farming. Wind energy was harnessed and used in ancient civilizations but during the Industrial Revolution, for economic reasons, oil was seen as a cheaper way to obtain energy. 

Coal, gas and oil prices have now rocketed. Once wind power energy has been established, it could stabilize energy prices. With the new wind turbine technology now available it makes renewable wind energy the cheapest and most economical way to create clean energy for all.

Learn how you can build your own wind turbines for $200 or less at Clean4Energy or Green Power Easy DIY Guide

Although there are many individual ways in which solar cells can be used, there are still only 4 basic applications to use them. Essentially, any way a solar cell can be used will fall into a category that I shall briefly describe below.Utility Grid Connections – This is when solar cells supplement energy needs for the house or commercial business, being hooked into the regular electrical grid and supplying power directly through the lines. If more electricity is generated by solar than is needed, many electrical companies will give credit and/or refunds for the extra power sent back into the lines.A Grid Interactive System – When solar cells are used to maintain and charge up battery back-up systems for household or commercial usage. Any person or business would use a system like this to insure continued power if main grid electricity was shut down for any reason. Computer banks might benefit greatly from this technology.Remote Solar Cell Usage – Solar cells and panels used as an electricity supply in places where electrical service has not been developed yet. Wilderness cabins, undeveloped landscape and 3rd world countries would all benefit with using solar power in these remote areas.Product Applications for Consumers – Basically the use of solar cells to replace battery applications in a wealth of products. Things like calculators, cap fans, and any low voltage toy can be made to run off of solar cells saving on battery use and consequently, landfill issues for discarded batteries.With the newer higher efficiency solar cells and panels on the market today, these applications have become more common and useful than ever before.

Tracking advances in solar cell technology, I’ve stumbled across another landmark efficiency gain.  This one, obtained by switching from conventional screen printing to a non-contact aerosol jet printer, has upped efficiencies by 2 percent on thin-film solar cells.Thin-film solar cells (TFSC) are defined as solar cells made by depositing one or more thin layers (nanometers to micrometers) of photovoltaic material on a substrate. These thin-film cells are classed as: amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride, copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), polysilicon, dye-sensitized solar cells, or organic (plastic, or polymer) solar cells – the latter three still in development stages.Printing is a deposition method, and the use of aerosol jet printing could raise the copper indium gallium selenide efficiency – already reported at 9.5 percent (with reports from NREL in excess of 19 percent) – to a value competitive with silicone-based solar at about half the cost to manufacture.The advance, coming from the Fraunhofer Institute’s Solar Energy Systems in Germany, reports that using an Optomec printer enabled thinner strata deposition of metallic, semiconducting and insulating inks via nanoscale pigments developed by Applied Nanotech Inc. enabled efficiences in excess of 20 percent, as compared to previous figures of 16 to 18 percent.Fraunhofer also used the printer to fabricate front-side metallization lines on otherwise conventional solar cells, which enabled it to shrink the metallization area and boost efficiency by reducing shading losses.Screen-printed solar cells can be manufactured faster than ink-jet printing methods, and the Optomec’s 40-nozzle head can print a solar cell in under 3 seconds. What this means to you, the consumer, is a future of truly affordable solar. What it means to the environment is of inestimable value.Of course, waiting to save a few bucks doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of the environment. News coming out of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland (December 5 to 12) indicates that climate change is not only upon us, but likely to reach that critical “tipping point” in as little as a decade.

How Solar Cells Save the Environment

Sure, we all know that solar panels are green and clean, but how really green are they? Wouldn’t it be nice to actually see some facts and figures for a change instead of hearing phrases like solar cells save oil or solar cells reduce air pollutants? Anyone can say that about anything green, but here we will now look at some honest to goodness hard facts to ponder.

First things first, a 2.5kw solar panel array, which is very common, will supply about 380 kilowatts per month calculated with 5 sun hours per day.  The average house, meanwhile, burns about 700 kilowatts of electricity per month.  In raw terms, those electrical savings will amount to over 300 barrels of oil saved per year, or the equivalent mileage of 270,000 driven miles.

solar panel

Want more details? Having that system saves 2 tons of coal burning which generates the same amount of electricity. Needless to say, that cuts down on the equivalent amount of acid rain emissions, and literally reduces all greenhouse gases by over one quarter of a million pounds! Over 25 years, in a botanical and environmental sense, this is like planting 5000 trees, doing all that good from the roof of your house!

Now,  couple those figures with the rising cost of electricity, and you are doing just as much good for your pocketbook as you are for the safe environment.Those are just the facts. But maybe best of all, knowing about all of this and then going solar gives you something much better then just facts, it gives you some piece of mind.

Currently, most solar technologies are delivered via silicon crystals, whose highly refined nature and relative scarcity make them expensive components in the solar process. This makes the end-product equally expensive, and cost is one of the factors limiting the use of solar panels to generate energy.

Plastic, or polymer, solar cells are relative newcomers to solar technology, but their potential advantages – lower cost, lighter weight and greater flexibility – promise to sweep the solar industry, once sourcing and manufacturing are refined.Polymers are plastic-type substances, usually made from petroleum. Organic plastics, typically represented by such products as amber and shellac (or tree sap), may soon be available from cellulose, or food products like corn, making organic polymer solar technology not only inexpensive but environmentally friendly; i.e., disposable.

Konarka Technologies, Inc., recently announced that their flagship product, Power Plastic®, was rated at 6 percent efficiency. This may not seem like much, but solar panels currently in use rarely boast more than 12- to 14-percent efficiency, and polymer cell technology is still in its infancy. For Konarka to achieve 6 percent with its flexible organic based photovoltaic (PV) solar is truly an important milestone, as co-developer Dr. Alan Heeger of the University of California (Santa Barbara) notes.”This progress gives us confidence that we are on a technology pathway toward the vision of high efficiency, low cost ‘plastic’ solar cells.”

Heeger of Konarka

Heeger, one of the co-founders of Konarka, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000. He and his colleagues at UCSB are currently focused on issues related to the fundamental electronic structure of polymer solar cells, and hopes in the near future to bump that efficiency rating to a full 10 percent, which would make it highly competitive with silicon-based solar.

Another discovery, from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, promises to improve polymer solar material by substituting a silicon atom (or a crystalline) for a carbon atom in the backbone of the polymer. Eventually, says UCLA researcher and co-author Hsiang-Yu Chen, solar cells may be as thin as paper, attachable to any surface, and colored to match different applications.Imagine hanging a solar panel alongside your deck or patio that looks like a Van Gogh!

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A solar cell is a device which changes sunlight into electricity. A more technical term for a solar cell is a photovoltaic cell. The term “photo” derives from the Greek word for “light,” and the term “voltaic” comes from the word “volt” which means “electrical force.” A “cell” is a small receptacle or container containing electrodes which generate power. Thus, a photovoltaic cell is a container that creates electric force, through light. Whereas a solar cell can generate electricity from any light source, its intended use is the collection of solar energy from the sun.

How a Solar Cell Works

The solar cell works as follows: Photons (which are particles of light in sun rays) hit the surface of the solar cell and are absorbed a semiconductor, such as silicon. These photons (bits of sunlight) knock electrons loose from the atoms inside the semiconductor. The photons then push the electrons along, leaving a “gap” in the atom. Another electron is then pulled from an adjacent atom to fill the gap. And so an electrical flow is generated.

The simplicity of this is that one atom has an extra electron, and the other atom is missing one. This is referred to as a “difference in potential.” Nature, wanting to remain balanced, tries to even things out by pulling another electron from the neighboring atom. A solar panel is comprised of a group of solar cells which are linked together to produce the desired amount of electrical energy. A group of solar cells linked together can also be referred to as a “module.” Thus the terms “solar panel,” and “solar module,” are synonymous to each other, and essentially mean the exact same thing. “Solar panel” is the more common term, and “solar module” is the technical term.

solar panel

One can use solar panels individually or one can link several together in order to generate more electricity. When a group of solar panels are linked together, it is called a “solar array”. The more solar panels are included in a solar array, the more power they produce. Solar Power is a clean and virtually unlimited source of energy. I say “virtually unlimited” because the sun itself won’t last forever. But we won’t have to worry about that for the next few billion years. Since solar power is a clean energy source which has been around for decades, one might wonder why its not used more. The answer to this lies partially in the cost of producing solar panels, as well as in the efficiency of the solar panels.

We are currently in the second generation of solar panel technology and verging on the third. A lot has changed since the first generation. Solar panels a are becoming a viable source of clean energy. The solar cells of earlier times were relatively large and bulky compared to our current models. In view of the amount of energy and material required to produce them, and the amount of energy they actually produced, it was more costly to use solar energy than to use fossil fuels. The only exception was in places where little or no fossil fuels were available, such as in space.

With the second-generation solar cells, we attempted to tackle this exact problem. We attempted improve manufacturing techniques so as to reduce the costs, materials and energy needed for the production of solar cells. Recently, major advances have been made in the production of solar cells, which have reduced production costs. One contribution in this area was the development of techniques to coat glass or ceramic materials with very thin layers of semi-conductive substances. This made it possible to produce solar panels using only a fraction of the semi-conductive material that was required earlier.

Solar panel

The production of solar panels using this second-generation technology is referred to as “Thin Film Technology.” Third-generation solar energy technologies are currently being researched and developed. The objective is to improve the power of solar cells even further (while keeping production costs to a minimum) in which case thirty to sixty percent of the sunlight hitting the panels will be converted into electricity. (Currently, solar panels convert only about twenty percent.) But regardless of third generation solar technology, the second-generation solar cell is efficient enough to make solar technology viable – and a host of new solar-powered products have hit the consumer market.

Solar-powered calculators have been in use for a while now, we’ve all seen them. We have even seen a few other novelty devices. But only in the last few years have solar devices come into serious and practical use. The last two years in particular have seen a virtual explosion of solar devices hitting the market. Solar flashlights (I’ve often wandered what use they were), solar-powered radios, and, recently, solar battery chargers.

One can also now find a wide range of portable solar chargers and panels, which are lightweight and easy to transport, yet capable of providing a decent amount of power in even the most remote locations. Solar chargers are becoming a standard part of wilderness survival kits and emergency preparedness kits. All of this is a result of the developments in solar cell technology, and the coming of the Solar Age.

The earth has blessed us with an abundance of green energy, all we need to do is tap into it. This site shares a few of the popular green energies like solar and wind power, what we failed to mention is hydro power, bio energy, geothermal, tidal or wave and hydrogen fuel cells. Green energy is defined in Wikipedia as “sources of energy that are considered to be environmentally friendly and non-polluting”. This is in true and rare form our new generation of energy. Fossil fuels in time will be exhausted or cost dearly to manufacture, not to mention the carbon foot print we have left for our children.

If you were to walk outside during the day and look around you would notice that green energy is all around us. Everywhere you look there is a source of untapped green energy. The most unique thing of all is it has always been there just patiently waiting for us to come to our senses. The sun shines every day, the wind blows frequently, the rivers flow all the time, the waves in the ocean crash on the shore like clockwork. None of these forces ever call in sick or just stop working, they are more constant than any other source of energy we have. They are not controlled by other countries and best of all they are free!

Green energy is the way of the future it is the only way we can save the earth for our future generations, it is the only way we can reverse the global warming. The government also sees a clear view of green energy you can view on their site here: http://www.eere.energy.gov/ they have it all broken down by programs. The government is also offering grants which can be viewed from the same page. Any way you look at it green energy is here to stay.

So if green energy is so good and it is here to stay then why are we not embracing our future? Well, all you have to do is look at the economy and the shrinking that has happen since October 2007. In a shrinking economy one does not spend large amounts of capital on an investment like green energy. That would probably be the biggest problem with green energy is the initial capital that has to be spent to buy and install the equipment. Over time the investment will pay for itself but, right now it is cheaper for us to use our 120 year old addiction to fossil energy. So how do we break the habit?

The government is offering rebates on green energy you can read the form here: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f5695.pdf up to 30% off! With that in mind it makes the pain of the expenditure just a little more inviting.