Getting solar energy would have to be one of the largest sources of energy that you could use for your home, and one of the best things about it is that it is a renewable power source. With solar energy, not only would you be able to help in lessening your carbon footprint on the ozone layer, but you would be able to save money and give some of your electricity back to the grid, which would help lessen power blackouts.
Working with Cali Solar, a dependable California solar energy company would help you turn to solar power and make a mark on the environment. So, what is the latest technology in Solar Panels in California?
What Are the New Advancements in Solar Power in California?
- Contactless dispensing process
There are some solar cell manufacturing companies out there that are offering contactless dispensing processes. This is a process that is used in order to apply metal contracts to your solar cells.
This type of technology is usually compared to somebody squeezing a tube of toothpaste because all of the materials that are going to be used on your solar panel are going to be pressed through these minuscule nozzles through a contactless printing process. This way, you could be able to get highly parallel print heads and add them to the surface of your solar cell.
The developers of this technology would be using nozzles with diameters, and these are usually only half as thick as the hair of a human. These tiny nozzles would produce the structure that you want it to be and they would easily be integrated into your cells if it was made out of silicon.
This discovery would help in reducing the cost of silver by around 20 percent. Because of this, the front-side contacts are much thinner and they would have this large semiconductor surface so much larger and exposed to sunlight.
- Record efficiency
A percentage of 25.9% of efficiency has been achieved for the first time when using a multi-junction solar cell that was grown directly on a silicon substrate. And since they have discovered this, they are processing it further so that they could increase the efficiency of the cells while reducing the cost of the manufacturing.
With this, they are aiming to have a tandem technology that people would be able to access in the future by making a more cost-effective process that would be able to combine the silicon and make it the lowest sub-cell.
- Transparent solar cells
There is now a team at the University of Michigan who have discovered a new set of efficiency records. They used an organic, or carbon-based design instead of using the conventional silicon, they used transparent solar cells where they were able to achieve 8.1 percent efficiency and 43.3 percent transparency. They use much less toxic materials unlike all of the other transparent solar cells on the market and they manufactured this on a large scale.
These transparent solar cells could also be customized to the latitudes of where you want them to be, so they could efficiently collect the rays of the sun when it is hitting the cells at a certain angle. You would be able to place this between the panes of your windows so it could be integrated into your architecture as well.
Things You Should Know About Solar Power in California
Solar power has been around much earlier than we thought it was, and the first-ever solar cell was actually developed in the 19th century, even though it could only harness about 1 percent solar efficiency. When you are using solar energy, it is entirely renewable and free because then you would not need to spend money on electricity from the grid once the sunlight is converted to electricity. This would allow you to save millions of millions of barrels of oil.
In order to use solar energy, you are usually going to have to use a solar panel. These cells are made out of semiconductors that would be able to convert the sunlight that is hitting them into electricity. You would be able to convert about 20 percent of sunlight into working electricity you could use for your home. Solar thermal panels and photovoltaic panels are the 2 types of solar panels we have right now.
When it comes to maintenance, there really isn’t a lot you have to do. You just have to make sure that they are clean and that nothing is blocking the cells because it would affect the amount of sunlight that would hit the solar panels, in turn, affecting the amount of electricity that you would receive. A solar panel could last up to 30 to 40 years, so they have a relatively long lifespan.