Me and my partner have been travelling round Europe all summer in our converted van and have been mostly relying on our solar panels for our energy.
This got me thinking, how the hell does Solar Power/Energy work?
In: 2
Your Panel consists of the blue stuff and the small strips of metal.
The metal strips catch energy “created” by the sun (electrons) and feed it to your panel output.
The blue parts are made of a special material (semiconductor) that is “doped” with extra “free electrons”. These free electrons don’t have a proper place to stay (no atom) and are just hanging out in the material. When the sun shines, some sunrays hit those electrons and give them their energy. This extra energy makes the free atoms go wild, they’re in a high state of energy and want to party. They are driven towards the small metal strips, because that’s where the party is! However, they have to get there quickly because since they are so wild, they don’t know what they’re doing and will happily shoot away the extra energy in form of a lightray. Luckily, quite a few of them do make it and those party-electrons power your devices. Unfortunately this also gets them off of their wild party-state and they go back to the solar panel.
Researchers try to develop panels where as many sunrays as possible (the sun gives lightrays in all colours of the rainbow, which combined look white) can get as many free electrons as possible to the wild party state and to be absorbed at the metal strips.
My first eli5 attempt and I chose a topic that takes a full university lecture and background in quantum mechanics to really understand xD Hope it makes any sense at all!
edit: maybe also type in “how do solar cells work” into YouTube to get a video that visualizes it.
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