PV Gap

Kristin Said:

is solar power easily made into electrisity?

We Answered:

Turning solar energy into electricity is not particularly difficult, in the sense that you can buy equipment to do exactly this. The reason we don't see it used more often is the cost. Amortized over time, solar electricty costs maybe 30 to 50 cents a kilowatt-hour in the US, while electricity from the power company can be half that, or even a third.

The main cost driver for solar electric panels is the cost of Silicon, the same material used to make computer chips. There is a shortage of properly-refined silicon right now, and it's costing ten times or more what is used to cost just a few years ago. As more silicon supplies come on line in the next two years, prices should come down dramatically. The big milestone for the industry is "grid parity," when the cost of solar electricity is the same as getting it from the power company. If this milestone is crossed, it becomes a cost saving for the average person to put up solar panels, so their adoption should take off wildly.

With today's technology, it takes about 3 years of energy output from the solar panels to recover the energy used to make them, including the energy to make the glass and aluminum frame. This is for a type of panel called crystalline silicon. For thin-film panels, the energy input can be recovered in as little as 1 year.

1 kilowatt-hour of energy could take you 100 miles on an electric bicycle. That is approximately the energy of bright sunlight shining on one square meter of area for one hour. Since solar panels are not 100% efficient, in practice, you need about 6 to 8 square meters of panels to harvest this kind of energy. The panels would cost $5-8000 today, but remember, they're installed once, then keep producing power for 20 or 25 years. With the mounting, labor, and everything else, such a system would cost mabye $10-12,000.

We put up solar panels. See the link below.