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Solar PV is perhaps what most people think of first when they think of renewables (though we actually use more biomass). Solar PV can be used anywhere the sun shines as long as there is space available. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in one hour, to meet the world’s energy demand for a year, if it could be collected. It is eminently scalable with installations ranging from a few kilowatts to the 48 megawatt Copper Mountain solar farm in Nevada. Utility scale solar capacity is quite small compared to the big boys, like the 8200 MW Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Japan or the 5780 MW Taichung coal plant in China.
Solar presently contributes a very small share of our energy pie, around 1 percent, but it continues to grow at double-digit rates and is projected to triple from 2010-15 after growing almost ten-fold from 2003-2010.
It is also the subject of a great deal of research, so we should expect a number of breakthroughs coming down the pike, including things like nano-pillars to lower cost, concentrators to reduce the area required, and more efficient and powerful cells, to reduce both. Most solar PV systems today are either made from traditional silicon-based solar cells, or the newer thin-film technology.
Solar PV systems produce DC current, which can be used with DC appliances or converted to AC by means of an inverter. More and more of today’s electronics run on DC, which requires those little power supplies that plug into the wall which convert the AC to DC. This could be an opportunity in the future to power these devices directly from solar PV, eliminating the efficiency losses that occur when converting from DC to AC and then back again.
Let’s take a look at the solar PV pros and cons.
Pros
RP Siegel, PE, is the President of Rain Mountain LLC. He is also the co-author of the eco-thriller Vapor Trails, the first in a series covering the human side of various sustainability issues including energy, food, and water. Now available on Kindle.
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RP Siegel (1952-2021), was an author and inventor who shined a powerful light on numerous environmental and technological topics. His work appeared in TriplePundit, GreenBiz, Justmeans, CSRWire, Sustainable Brands, Grist, Strategy+Business, Mechanical Engineering, Design News, PolicyInnovations, Social Earth, Environmental Science, 3BL Media, ThomasNet, Huffington Post, Eniday, and engineering.com among others . He was the co-author, with Roger Saillant, of Vapor Trails, an adventure novel that shows climate change from a human perspective. RP was a professional engineer - a prolific inventor with 53 patents and President of Rain Mountain LLC a an independent product development group. RP was the winner of the 2015 Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week blogging competition. RP passed away on September 30, 2021. We here at TriplePundit will always be grateful for his insight, wit and hard work.