Why can’t we amplify the temperature that solar panel receives from the sun to create more energy?
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Solar panels don’t use temperature to create energy, they use the actual photons coming off of the sun itself.
Light is made up of little particles called photons. These photons carry the energy that light has. When a photon hits a solar panel, it translates it’s energy into the movement of electrons that make up electricity. The rest of the energy gets converted into heat. The heat is a “waste” product and is not converted into usable electrical energy. In the most efficient solar panel designs, the amount of heat is actually minimized since that’s wasted energy.
Now, if you’re talking about using thermo-electric generators on the back of solar panels to capture some of that heat energy, it’s actually a good question to why we don’t do that. The reason is mostly because of cost-per-watt. The amount of “extra” energy you would capture from a solar panel using a thermo-electric generator would not outweigh the added cost that would come from doing that. A solar panel with added thermo-electric generators would cost more than one that didn’t, and the difference in cost would never be made up for by the difference in captured energy.
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