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Do you know anything about the free flow of electrons through a circuit? How about silicon? Do you find yourself asking how do solar panels work? Though both of these are elementally simple subjects, taught to us during high school chemistry class, when we put them together and utilize them to redirect the sun's energy for our own purposes, it can get a little bit confusing. So, here's to wishing that we would have paid closer attention in chemistry class, and that the world would have created this invaluable renewable energy source before the planet found itself in trouble. Solar panels are just this, electrons, a circuit, and silicon. Can you plug your refrigerator into any one of these components to get crisp, cold soda? Definitively not. You can learn how they all work together to create, store, and deliver power to your home.
When silicon is stripped of all impurities, it is an invaluable conductor of electrons. This is the same element which bore the computer revolution and has kept it booming over the past three decades. Solar panels, and how they work, are very basic, almost rudimentary, which is why the cost of having them installed sometimes leaves us cold and speechless. It can cost between $5,000 and $40,000 to have your home installed with solar boxes for natural energy creation, and there are even folks who are capable of building these handy dandy panels from scratch.
Silicon is composed of four electrons, but has enough room for eight. This means that it is readily accepting of chemical fusion with other elements to create both negatively and positively charged materials. Pure silicon, infused with itself, technically, is harvested in sheets, and this is the part of the panel that you see. These pure silicon sheets are at the top and the bottom of the solar unit, with positive and negative materials layered in between them, and wire conductors sandwiched between these materials. Angled properly toward the sun's rays, the solar plates pick up photons, which basically hammer away at the excess electrons and send them bouncing away from the fused electrons, causing energy to be created.
The biggest problem that we face with solar power, and how these panels work, is that there is very little excess energy created, as the loose electrons just stick back to the whole ones once the photons cease to stimulate them. What little excess energy is produced can be stored in batteries, but this in never enough to keep things going when the sun is not strong, such as during cloudy days and stormy weather.