Introduction
Energy drives the world today. The energy required today must be easily available, reliable, and affordable. Since the Industrial Revolution, fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas have been the major sources of energy that have driven modern world. However, fossil fuel resources are limited, and continued dependency on them may have severe and adverse effects on the environment. Fortunately, when it comes to energy, there are alternatives. The most important, powerful and significant burns brightly in the morning sky.
Solar energy has tremendous potential and its utilization is developing quick, yet in numerous quarters it is still seen with worry about expenses and questions over viability. All nations and economies stand to pick up by understanding that solar energy’s capability to fill a substantial piece of aggregate energy needs financially, in a protected and feasible way later on. It can likewise help to decrease the greenhouse gasses (GHGs) that debilitate irreversible environmental change for the planet.
We are drenched in the clean, and almost inexhaustible energy of the sun. Statistically speaking, every hour, the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth is enough to meet the world’s energy requirements for a year. To make use and exploit this, technology that efficiently converts the solar energy into other usable forms is needed. Several programs exist which try to develop new and more efficient technologies for converting solar energy into energy of everyday use.
The majority of the several government programs’ budget is allocated to photovoltaic (PV) research and development (R&D). PV devices such as solar panels convert solar energy directly into electricity. However, several materials are used through a variety of fabrication processes for creating PV devices, each having its own advantages and disadvantages. The major compensation is between fabrication cost and sunlight-to-electricity conversion efficiency—higher efficiency typically translates into higher cost. Program participants consistently achieve world-record efficiencies or different types of PV, but each effort has the same ultimate goal: optimizing cost and efficiency to produce the least expensive end-use electricity.
Solar Thermal Technologies
Solar energy can be put to work in several additional ways. Technologies in solar thermal energy provide electricity, hot water, space heating, and lighting. They are cost effective with solar water heating being the cheapest form of solar energy and can even work in tandem with traditional energy sources to improve the flexibility and dependability of the electricity they produce (van der Hoeven 48).
The Electronic Materials and Devices (EM&D) venture handles the mechanical difficulties of basic significance to today's PV industry and the PV business without bounds. The task's high-risk, high-rewards research is driven by the National Renewable Energy Labs .
The United States has a few interesting open doors to gain by PV innovations. In the first place, the U.S. PV industry drives the world in creating thin films, the quickest developing section of the PV market. Second, solar energy resources are appropriate to utilization of PV concentrator frameworks for wide scale power generation. At last, the moderately cheaper U.S. power will require PV to be less costly here than in a large portion of the world—requiring new fabrication and synthesis strategies that maintain a strategic distance from exorbitant vacuum synthesis, reduce mechanical stress, and build throughput drastically.
Advanced Computational Techniques
Investigating and creating advances to take advantage of these three open doors is the essential errand of the EM&D venture. The venture performs research in semiconductor materials, gadget properties, and manufacture forms to enhance the proficiency, stability, and expense of PV. One noteworthy center is creating innovation that empowers combinatorial materials science. Traditional materials science works in a straight manner: perform a test, break down the outcomes, and utilize the outcomes to choose the following investigation. Today's progressed computational sciences empowers combinatorial materials science, in which numerous trials are performed and broken down and analysed about at the same time at every progression, to enormously quicken the rate at which information is obtained. However, the subsequent surge of information can be overpowering without new instruments to translate and impart it. The EM&D venture creates custom programming instruments to separate valuable data from combinatorial examinations (De Meo & Galdo, 4-5).
Thin Film Photovoltaics
Thin film photovoltaics utilizes an extremely thin layer of dynamic semiconductor—the material that really changes over daylight into power—which can be fabricated using an assortment of compounds. The EM&D extend reliably manufactures thin films of cadmium telluride (CdTe) and copper indium diselenide (CIS, which is called CIGS when the component gallium is included) with world-record conversion efficiencies. To wring much more power out of a PV cell, thin films can be layered in a "multijunction" design, with every layer creating power from an alternate area of the solar visible light spectrum (2006).
Concentrator photovoltaic Cells
PV concentrators utilize generally reasonable - optics to think daylight onto a little range of high-effectiveness, multijunction cells. In a perfect multijunction cell, the top layer delivers a large portion of the total solar energy, so the top layer ought to be of the most astounding quality. But in traditional outlines developed from the base layer to the top, the structure of the top cell is corrupted. The task is building up a novel way to deal with overcoming this issue: developing the multijunction layers upside down. These "modified" cells have numerous points of interest what's more, the possibility to surpass 40%-productive concentrator transformation. A world-record 37.9%-productive concentrator cell has as of now been exhibited utilizing this methodology. Extra systems for lower-cost, elite concentrator cells being sought after by the venture to incorporate developing multijunction cells on silicon substrates.
Conclusions
New innovations and technologies in solar energy converters are always on the rise. As Edison watched long back, turning them into gainful assets and techniques dependably requires further work. In solar energy, such choices incorporate sunlight based fossil hybrids, small scale solar thermal energy and sunlight based energizes, and sun powered biofuels. New arrangement choices additionally develop, specifically at the global level, from solar power trade to different methods to connect North and South solar deployment and financing. There are agencies who are resolved to encourage investigating such choices and new blends, in an open dialog with intrigued partners all through the world. Made because of a solicitation from the G8 and IEA Ministers, the International Low-Carbon Energy Technology Platform tries to support, quicken and scale-up activity for the advancement, deployment and spreading of low-carbon energy innovations –including solar energy.
References
DeMeo, E. A., and J. F. Galdo. Renewable energy technology characterizations. No. TR--109496. Electric Power Research Institute, Palo Alto, CA (United States); US DOE, Office of Utility Technologies, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Washington, DC (United States), 1997.
van der Hoeven, Maria. Renewable Energy Technologies: Solar Energy Perspectives. 1st ed. Paris: International Energy Agency, 2011. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.
DOE Solar Energy Technologies Program - Overview And Highlights. 1st ed. Oak Ridge: US Department of Energy, 2006. Web. 20 Mar. 2016.
