Solar Technology And Old Computers

Residential Solar power has been available for many years now.  I can remember an uncle of mine from the North East installed solar units on his roof back in 1984. They were quite the eye sore with their enormous size.  As fancy and hi-tech as they were at the time, they scarcely created sufficient energy to heat the water of the home and certainly not enough to power the rest of it. Fast forward a to now and solar technology has improved greatly and the same size solar array now may well power a small house totally; however, solar tech still has room to improve.

You can think of this issue with solar panels like the early versions of home computers. Most who lived through the 1980’s ought to remember the Commodore 64 which had a colossal 64k (kilobytes) of RAM…. Yes, I said, 64K. The other day I upgraded my Computer to 16gb (gigabytes) RAM; that’s 250 thousand times more RAM than the outdated Commodore. Compare that old machine to a modern day iMac and there is no comparison. The power of computing is light-years over and above where it was 30 years in the past. The same cannot necessarily be said about solar panels. The same buyer demand has not pushed the industry as it did private computing.

Don’t misunderstand me, solar technology has without a doubt come a long way and today they are producing much more efficient solar cells and smaller units able to provide significant power to a home. Yet it will not be until the solar cell designers can manage to develop solar cells that are compact, durable and capable of supplying all the power necessary for a contemporary house at a reasonable price that can be recovered by savings over only a couple of years, not decades; the majority of typical property owners will pass.

Improvements leading to the goal of high-efficiency solar systems is now happening. Since around 2002, the “Green Movement” has considerably impacted modern society thanks to the promotion of global warming. As well, the rise of developing countries whose contribution to polluting the environment is significant, has pushed the developed world find techniques to neutralize this pollution with green-laws and stricter requirements. It’s not just tree-huggers who are concerned with the environment and their personal impact on the planet; its regular Joes who have some concern about their home planet, but a little more concern about their energy costs. Some have taken the plunge which can be well worth it thinking about today’s solar technology. Many are waiting for the day when they can install a solar power system that provides all the energy for their modern house and takes them off the grid completely, at a acceptable price that they can recover in a short time. We are getting there.

In December 2011 Semprius, a solar cell developer, announced the development of new solar micro-cells that use a method called ‘micro-transfer-printing’ to develop solar cells the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen. This means that thousands of cells can occupy the space that previous solar panel cells could only fit a hundred. This means highly concentrated panels in compact sizes. The process also uses much less industrial material then prior processes which will make the creation of these solar systems cleaner and cheaper.

With these new developments, the time is coming when the average purchaser will have possibilities to install compact, extremely efficient solar power units that won’t won’t make them regret it. They will be able to power their home mostly or entirely using compact, unobtrusive hardware for a reasonable price. Just like the high-powered PCs of today, the high-power solar energy systems of tomorrow are coming to a neighborhood near you.