Solar Panel Technology

Watch the leaves on trees turn green in the spring and in a very real sense you're witnessing how solar panels work. Sound odd? Well it's not because once you understand how plants produce green chlorophyll, you will understand how this is so. You see, chlorophyll is made up of tiny cells called chloroplasts that are created by photons from the sunlight inducing molecular change.

The fact is that there are actual microscopic particles in sunlight that as a group make up the waves of light that you can see emanating up when you're driving down a long straight road on a hot day. So then now that you've seen these waves of light made up of photons, and the green chlorophyll in leaves being produced by these light particles, understanding how solar panels work should be a little easier.

A solar panel is made up of a series of cells that are all connected together by wires. The cells are the small, flat round things about the diameter of an orange that you can see on the face of a panel. The more cells on a panel, the more power it's capable of producing. It's just that simple. So then what about the sunlight-green leaf-solar panel connection?

So just as the photons in sunlight cause molecular change in leaves to form chloroplasts, the photons cause molecular change in solar cells. That is that they quite literally knock electrons loose from special substances that the solar cells are made from, and it's these loose electrons that are what electricity is made up of. They enter the wires and then become electrical power.

The science behind it all is really quite simple, and in fact it was way back in the 1800s when scientist first discovered that electricity can be made using sunlight. However, the problem has always been in developing the cost effective technology required to put it to use. To make solar panels actually worth buying and using on homes, and businesses.

In fact it's only been in the last couple of decades that solar panels have become a profitable prospect for home and business owners. Panels that now produce some 130% the value of their cost in terms of usable power over the course of their service life. Even so, scientists continue to work on new ways to make them more productive, affordable and attractive.

Flexible solar panels were one recent huge step, and the work to make them increasingly thinner will probably never end. This is because the ultimate goal in thin film solar panel technology is panels so thin that you will be able to see right through them. Just imagine a home covered with micro-thin film cells, windows and all and you can't tell that they're even there.

Sound hard to believe? Well you can believe it because physicists and materials scientists have the theories and concepts behind it all worked out. The big problem though is that the technology to make things like this a reality just doesn't exist quite yet. It will though someday.