Joining the ranks of 5 countries other than the U.S. that have hit the 1 gigawatt solar milestone (Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and the Czech Republic), California has now installed its 1st gigawatt (or 1,000th megawatt) of rooftop solar installed.
To put that into perspective, 1GW of solar can power up to 750,000 homes and is equal to about 2 coal-fired power plants.
Why we are asking this now?
Solar energy does not require any introduction as a potential source of renewable energy. Sunlight is plenty through out the year in tropical and subtropical regions. And these regions consist all most 50 percent of total land mass in the world. So, if solar energy is harnessed efficiently along these areas, energy generation would become lot greener in future.
However, today’s solar technology has too many problems starting from capturing sunlight to storage and distribution of generated electricity. For power generation, generally, two types of technologies are used – photovoltaic and solar thermal type. And both the technologies are expensive to install. Photovoltaic cells are made of expensive silicon compounds while the thermal type system requires huge parabolic structures to concentrate heat.
Some solar devices, like calculators, only need a small panel of solar cells to function. But supplying enough power to meet all our daily needs would require enormous solar panels. And solar-powered energy collected by panels made of silicon, a semiconductor material, is limited — contemporary panel technology can only convert approximately seven percent of optical solar waves into electric current.
Profs. Koby Scheuer, Yael Hanin and Amir Boag of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Physical Electronics and its innovative new Renewable Energy Center are now developing a solar panel composed of nano-antennas instead of semiconductors. By adapting classic metallic antennas to absorb light waves at optical frequencies, a much higher conversion rate from light into useable energy could be achieved. Such efficiency, combined with a lower material cost, would mean a cost-effective way to harvest and utilize “green” energy.
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