PV Gap

Christopher Said:

How much does it cost to make solar energy?

We Answered:

It depends. There are multiple ways of producing energy from sunlight. If you are talking about massive power plants then I do believe the method of using mirrors focused on a central tower has become almost the same price as fossil fuel methods. If you are talking about personal production for, say, a house, I have no idea.

Isaac Said:

How can you make solar energy on Mars?

We Answered:

Same as you do on Earth.

The thing is, since the solar intensity is a function of the square of the distance, you would need much bigger collectors on Mars than you would on Earth to obtain the same amount of energy.

Jordan Said:

How to make Solar energy to use in daily life?

We Answered:

There's no single answer to this. To "make" solar energy, you need to capture the energy from the sun and convert it into a usable form. The two most common forms are heat and electricity. Plans for solar water heaters are readily available on the Internet.

To generate electricity, and use it in your house, you'll need a number of items. First you need a bank of solar panels. A solar panel consists of a large number of cells, each of which generates electricity from sunlight. These panels can be wired together in a parallel configuration to provide increased capacity. The capacity of your solar panel bank can be expressed in kilowatt hours. That is the number of hours in a 24 hour period that your bank can produce 1000 watts of power. A 100 watt panel will generate about 1 KW/Hr of electricity per day. A typical household might need anywhere from 10 to 50 KW/Hrs of electricity per day, depending on your consumption habits, the size of the house and the number of people living there. You need to know what your daily electricity requirement is for your home before you begin to design a system.

The next thing you need is a place to store your electricity. The classical solution for this is a large battery bank. It is assumed that you're going to still be using electricity after the sun goes down, so you'll need a place to store your excess capacity to be used when it's dark out, or cloudy. You need enough storage capacity to store at least the amount you consume per day plus a compensating amount for inefficiency. The battery charge/discharge cycle is far from completely efficient, also you can count on losing 10% to 20% of your power in your inverter. There are many types of batteries. You'll need to do some research to choose the correct type for your application. Your battery bank will also need a charge controller. This is an electronic unit that monitors the condition of the batteries and relegates the correct charge for the current conditions.

An alternative to batteries is to simply sell your excess power to your local power utility company, "running your meter backwards". The advantage of this is that you don't have to maintain expensive batteries. Just sell more power to the electric company then you use, and use your utility company as a "battery". In the U.S., utility companies are generally obligated, by law, to do business with you, as long as your equipment meets their basic design standards. You'll need a "grid interactive" inverter for this.

That leads us to the last major component: The inverter. Solar panels generate electricity in DC current. Your house is wired, and your appliances expect 60 Hz AC current. The inverter converts the DC current to AC. As with everything, there are many variations of inverters, and a wide price range. The two major types of inverters are modified sine wave inverters and true sine wave inverters. A true sine unit costs a lot more, but creates a true, rounded AC sine wave, that is compatible with absolutely all appliances and electronic equipment that use AC. This is also a requirement for selling power to your utility. The modified sine wave inverter uses a simpler, cheaper circuit to output a two step square wave per half cycle. This is fine for most equipment, though some electric motors will operate at reduced efficiency and some battery chargers will not work. The grid interactive inverter, mentioned above is a true sine inverter that also guarantees that your output is in phase with the grid. This is a requirement to sell to your utility, since sending AC current out of phase into the grid is the same as creating a short in a DC circuit.

These are just some quick basics. Take a look at the link below to get an idea about what kind of equipment is available and how much it costs. If you have a basic knowledge of electricity and house wiring, you may find after a bit of study that designing and implementing a photo voltaic system is not beyond your abilities.