What is PV?
PV is an abbreviation for photovoltaics. Photo means light, and
Voltaic refers to voltage or electrical energy. The photovoltaic
effect was discovered over 150 years ago by a French scientist named
Edmund Becquerel in 1839.
Today's solar cells use silicon as their base material, and then
special coatings are applied to turn thin wafers of purified silicon
into a solar battery of sorts. This modern PV cell was discovered by
accident in 1954 when Bell Telephone Labs was experimenting with
silicon for uses like computer chips. Since that day PV has been
getting more efficient and cheaper for consumers.
Did you know? Silicon is the most abundant element on the earth,
being present in dirt, rocks and sand. The silicon from 1 ton of
sand made into PV cells would make as much energy as 500,000 tons of
coal! All that and it doesn't have to be mined!
How common is PV power?
Take a look at your calculator. I'd just about bet that your
calculator or your friends' calculator has a little PV window on it.
It seems that about 1/2 of all calculators these days have PV power
on them. There are PV powered devices all around us: watches,
clocks, lights at bus stops, mountaintop radio & TV transmission
stations, roadside emergency call boxes, satellites in space and
even this web site! Yes, this web site is 100% powered through PV.
So what about PV power for homes & businesses?
Well, PV has been used for home installations since the 1970's. It
was expensive then, but some people still got their hands on it and
managed to set it up. Today is a different story though. There are
estimates of over 120,000 homes using PV in the USA, and many times
that number elsewhere. Some experts have estimated that well over 1
million homes in Europe alone are powered with PV.
You can't run your central air conditioner all day long, use that
electric stove or electric water heater very cost effectively with a
PV system. (You can do it, but the key phrase is "cost effective"!)
There are people that do use PV & wind power (wind is a solar energy
by-product) to run very high power consumption devices. I've seen
articles and heard stories of people running heliarc welders and
hydrogen gas production facilities on PV based systems.