Friday, February 3, 2012

Solar Tech And 80?s Computers | Solar

Residential Solar power has been available for many years now. ?I remember my aunt back east had solar panels installed on her house back in 1984. The were very massive and industrial looking; not very pretty. ?As fancy and hi-tech as they were at the time, they hardly created enough 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 significantly and the same size solar arrangement now may power a small house entirely; yet the technology is still a bit lacking.

One can think of this issue with solar panels like the computers of the past. Folks who lived in the 80?s may recall the home computers of that time like the Commodore 64 which had a whopping 64k (kilobytes) of RAM?. Yes, I said, 64K. Just recently I upgraded my Pc to 16gb (gigabytes) RAM; that?s 250 thousand times more RAM than the outdated Commodore. Compare that outdated model to a contemporary iMac and there is no comparison. The power of computing is light-years beyond where it was 30 years ago. The same cannot necessarily be said about solar panels. The same buyer need has not pushed the industry as it did personal computing.

Don?t get me wrong, solar technology has indeed 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 makers can manage to produce solar cells that are compact, sturdy and capable of providing all the power necessary for a modern day home at a acceptable price that can be recovered by savings over only a couple of years, not decades; the vast majority of typical property owners will not get involved.

The time is now for these high-efficiency developments to occur, and they are in fact happening. Since the early 2000?s, the ?Green Movement? has substantially impacted modern day society thanks to the marketing of global warming. Likewise, the rise of developing countries whose contribution to polluting the atmosphere is considerable, has pushed the developed world uncover techniques to counterbalance this pollution with green-laws and stricter standards. It?s not just tree-huggers who are concerned with the earth?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 technologies. 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 realistic 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 make solar cells the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen. This means that thousands of cells can occupy the area that previous solar panel cells could only fit a hundred. This means highly concentrated panels in compact sizes. The method also uses less industrial materials then previous processes which will make the creation of these solar systems cleaner and cheaper.

Considering these sorts of new developments, the time is coming when the typical purchaser will have possibilities to install compact, highly efficient solar panels that won?t won?t put them in the poor house. They will be ready to power their residence largely or entirely using compact, unobtrusive hardware for a reasonable price. Just like the high-powered PCs of today, the high-power solar power systems of tomorrow are coming to a neighborhood near you.

Source: http://solarhydrogenproductinformation.com/2012/02/02/solar-tech-and-80s-computers/

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