The most common forms of renewable energy are solar, wind, bioenergy and waterpower.
Among these, solar energy has the greatest potential energy available for us to harness.
Even fossil fuel energy has been created thanks to the sun’s heating and cooling effect on the earth over many years.
In the past, most societies relied directly on sun energy to grow food, which in turn fueled human and animal energy to perform the majority of society’s services.
Today, this is only a fraction of our energy demands as we’ve exploited oil, natural gas and coal to a massive scale.
Knowing that these sources will only get scarcer, not to mention the negative impacts on the environment, our challenge is to once again harness the sun’s energy more directly.
The solar energy technologies available today help us to do just that.
Silicon, a semiconductor material, is the component of solar cells that makes electricity generation possible.
Radiant energy from the sun in the form of photons bump electrons of the silicon out of orbit around their nuclei, creating a flow of electrons known as Direct Current (DC) electricity.
