Generating Solar Energy

Solar energy and clean energy generation systems in general have lots of appeal these days, and governments around the globe are subsidizing their development as an alternative to the use of energy that comes from fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas, for example.

There are many ways to create solar energy, and there is no one particular technology that stands out and is the clear choice in every case. Photovoltaics have been around for quite a number of years. Basically photovoltaics use a semiconductor material to convert energy from the sun in the form of photons into electrical current. These devices are also known as solar cells. The problem with using solar cells on a commercial basis is that they have limits on the efficiencies that are possible. This means that only a certain amount of electrical current can be generated for a given area of solar cell material.

These systems are generally not cost competitive with obtaining energy from carbon based products like oil and coal. For many years now scientists have been doing research with different types of semiconductors and different ways of collecting sunlight to increase the amount of electrical current that can be produced. Certainly advances have been made, but without government subsidies people fall back on lower priced energy solutions based on carbon based sources.

Methods of concentrating sunlight to increase its intensity have been developed. Of course using these kinds of approaches brings on more challenges, and in particular the semiconductor junctions can become too hot and need to be cooled to prevent them from breaking down. Exotic types of semiconductor compounds are used because they have electrical properties that favor this concentrated light approach. These compounds are used in place of silicon, which has the advantages of being used for all sorts of integrated circuits for quite a few decades. The properties of silicon are very well known, and the costs of producing it are low.

Other ways to use the energy from the sun to create usable electricity and power include the use of thermal systems. In general, the heat from the sun is used to heat up some sort of material, and that energy is tapped to do work or to perhaps heat a building, for example. There are quite a few different approaches here as well, but once again, the costs are still higher than extracting energy from carbon based systems.

It is good that all these efforts, be they with semiconductor materials, wind or thermal power continue to be worked on. In order for one of them to become the dominant technology of the future they will have to be subsidized by governments because for now they are not cost competitive and the initial investments needed for development are huge. If crude oil were to reach $200 per barrel or higher, however, the picture might change. There is only a finite amount of oil, coal and natural gas on and in this planet, and supplies will not last forever. A greater issue might be that of carbon dioxide emissions, because of the greenhouse effect these and other gases create when burned.