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Solar panels installations company for the UK climate

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"Because not all solar panel technology is the same"

Simply put, solar tubes are the most efficient solar technology available. This is based on a 2001 study of all solar technologies by the Department of Trade and Industry. (Now Dept of Business). Since then solar tubes have evolved further, and now we are proud to showcase the latest in ‘direct’ heat solar tubes, which have improved solar efficiency even further.

Evacuated solar tubes

Also known as 'thermal solar collectors' this technology type is divided into 2 types.

'In-Direct' Solar Panels

Heats up anti freeze mixture and pushed through heat exchangers.

'Direct' Solar Panels (NEW)

Heats the actual water you use directly, using 'drawback technology". Find out More >>

FAQ's about solar panels in the UK

Can solar be used to run my central heating ?

Is there enough sunshine in the UK for solar panels ?

There are two types of solar panels, which is best ?

Can solar panels be added to flat roofs ?

How much energy will I save ?

What temperatures can I expect from hot water solar ?

Do I get hot water during the winter months ?

What about payback ?

Which is best, PV solar or solar tubes ?

What about solar grants ?

How big is solar hot water output ?

Why solar panels, not wind turbines ?

Learn about solar energy

After passing through the Earth's atmosphere, most of the sun's energy is in the form of visible and ultraviolet light. Plants use solar energy to create chemical energy through photosynthesis. Humans regularly use this energy burning wood or fossil fuels, or when simply eating the plants.

Solar Energy is made by the sun and gets stored in solar panels. Solar power does not just have to be used in the home it can be places like offices or where it’s hard to get electricity to, like a desert.

The rate at which solar radiation reaches a unit of area in the region of the Earth's orbit is approximately 1,400 W/m², as measured upon a surface normal (at a right angle) to the Sun. This number is referred to as the solar constant. Of the energy received, roughly 19% is absorbed by the atmosphere, while clouds on average reflect a further 35% of the total energy. The generally accepted standard is for peak power of 1020 W/m² at sea level. [1] The average power, which is an important quantity when one is considering using solar power, is lower. For example, in North America the average power lies somewhere between 125 and 375 W/m², between 3 and 9 kWh/m²/day.[2] It should be noted that maximum solar radiation energy intensity is meant here, and not the power delivered by a photovoltaic panel, which are about 15% efficient. Hence, a solar panel delivers 15 to 60 W/m² or 0.45-1.35 kWh/m²/day (annual day and night average).

Countless corporations and companies are currently developing ways to increase the practicality of solar power. While private companies conduct much of the research and development in this area, colleges and universities also work on solar-powered devices, especially solar-powered vehicles. Solar-powered cars have commonly appeared at many car and technology shows, and now solar boats are an interesting application of the technology. Colleges and universities compete against each other for superiority in this field of technology. They meet in competitions such as the Solar Splash[1]competition in North America, or the Frisian Nuon Solar Challenge[2] in Europe.

Because of much increased demand, the price of silicon used for most panels is now experiencing upward pressure. This has caused developers to start using other materials and thinner silicon to keep cost down. Due to economies of scale solar panels get less costly as we use and buy more — as manufacturers increase production the cost is expected to continue to drop in the years to come.

Grid tied PV systems represented the largest growth area. In the USA, with incentives from the government, power companies and (in 2006 and 2007) from the DTI, growth is expected to climb. Net metering programs are one type of incentive driving growth in solar panel use. Net-metering allows electricity customers to get credit for any extra power they send back into the grid, with roles reversed, the utility company as buyer, and the solar panel owner as the seller of electricity. Most net-metering systems have even prices, power companies reimbursing at the same price they sell, but a few only pay their avoided cost equivalent, as low as 1/3 of the price they charge their customers. In contrast to this, to spur growth of their renewable energy market, Germany has adopted an extreme form of net metering, whereby customers get paid 8 times what the power company charges them for any surplus they supply back to the grid. That large premium has made a huge demand in solar panels for that area.

A wide range of power technologies exist which can make use of the solar energy reaching Earth. These can be classified in a number of different ways.

Sunlight hits a photovoltaic cell (also called a photoelectric cell) creating electricity.

Sunlight hits the dark absorber surface of a solar thermal collector and the surface warms. The heat energy is carried away by a fluid circuit.

Solar design is the use of architectural features to replace the use of grid electricity and fossil fuels with the use of solar energy and decrease the energy needed in a home or building with insulation and efficient lighting and appliances.

Features used in solar design

South-facing (for the Northern Hemisphere) or north-facing (for the Southern Hemisphere) windows with insulated glazing that has high ultraviolet transmittance.

Thermal masses -- any masses such as walls or roofs that absorb and hold the sun's heat. Materials with high specific heat like stone, concrete, adobe or water work best (see Trombe walls).

Insulating shutters for windows to be closed at night and on overcast days. These trap solar heat in the building.
Fixed awnings positioned to create shade in the summer and exposure to the sun in the winter.

Movable awnings to be repositioned seasonally.

A well insulated and sealed building envelope.

Exhaust fans in high humidity areas.

Passive or active warm air solar panels. Pass air over black surfaces fixed behind a glass pane. The air is heated by the sun and flows into the building.

Active thermal solar panels using a heat transfer fluid (water or antifreeze solution). These are heated by the sun and the heat is carried away by circulation of the fluid for domestic hot water or building heating or other uses.

Passive thermal solar panels for preheating domestic hot water.

Photovoltaic systems (PV Solar Panels) to provide electricity.

Solar chimneys for cooling.

Planting deciduous trees near the windows. The leaves will give shade in summer but fall in winter to let the sunlight enter the building.

More about PV solar

You've probably seen calculators that have solar panels , calculators that never need batteries, and in some cases don't even have an off button. As long as you have enough light, they seem to work forever. You may have seen larger solar panels on emergency road signs or call boxes, on buoys, even in parking lots to power lights. Although these larger panels aren't as common as solar powered calculators, they're out there, and not that hard to spot if you know where to look. There are solar cell arrays on satellites, where they are used to power the electrical systems.

Together with a backup battery, they have become routine in certain low-power applications, such as powering buoys or devices in remote areas or simply where connection to the electricity mains would be impractical.

The relatively high cost of purchase and installation still prohibits their use in large-scale power generation. Solar PV panels currently make up a very small portion of the world's electricity production.

In experimental form they have even been used to power automobiles in races such as the World solar challenge across Australia. Many yachts and land-vehicles use them to charge on-board batteries away from grid power. Large-scale incentive programs, offering financial incentives like the ability to sell excess electricity back to the public grid, have greatly accelerated the pace of solar PV installations in Spain, Germany, Japan, the United States and other countries.

You have probably also been hearing about the "solar revolution" for the last 20 years, the idea that one day we will all use free electricity from the sun. This is a seductive promise: On a bright, sunny day, the sun shines approximately 1,000 watts of energy per square meter of the planet's surface, and if we could collect all of that energy we could easily power our homes and offices for free, well that revolution is here, and has already started.

In this website, we will examine solar panels, to learn how they convert the sun's energy directly into electricity. In the process, you will learn why we are getting closer to using the sun's energy on a daily basis, and why we still have more research to do before the process becomes cost effective.

The solar panel that you see on calculators and satellites are photovoltaic cells or modules (modules are simply a group of cells electrically connected and packaged in one frame). Photovoltaic's, as the word implies (photo = light, voltaic = electricity), convert sunlight directly into electricity. Once used almost exclusively in space, photovoltaic's are used more and more in less exotic ways. They could even power your house. How do these devices work?

Photovoltaic (PV) panels are made of special materials called semiconductors such as silicon, which is currently the most commonly used. Basically, when light strikes the cell, a certain portion of it is absorbed within the semiconductor material. This means that the energy of the absorbed light is transferred to the semiconductor. The energy knocks electrons loose, allowing them to flow freely.

Photovoltaic cells also all have one or more electric fields that act to force electrons freed by light absorption to flow in a certain direction. This flow of electrons is a current, and by placing metal contacts on the top and bottom of the PV cell, we can draw that current off to use externally. For example, the current can power a calculator. This current, together with the cell's voltage (which is a result of its built-in electric field or fields), defines the power (or wattage) that the solar cell can produce.

solar cell has silicon with impurities -- other atoms mixed in with the silicon atoms, changing the way things work a bit. We usually think of impurities as something undesirable, but in our case, our cell wouldn't work without them. These impurities are actually put there on purpose. Consider silicon with an atom of phosphorous here and there, maybe one for every million silicon atoms. Phosphorous has five electrons in its outer shell, not four.

It still bonds with its silicon neighbor atoms, but in a sense, the phosphorous has one electron that doesn't have anyone to hold hands with. It doesn't form part of a bond, but there is a positive proton in the phosphorous nucleus holding it in place.

When energy is added to pure silicon, for example in the form of heat, it can cause a few electrons to break free of their bonds and leave their atoms. A hole is left behind in each case. These electrons then wander randomly around the crystalline lattice looking for another hole to fall into. These electrons are called free carriers, and can carry electrical current. There are so few of them in pure silicon, however, that they aren't very useful. Our impure silicon with phosphorous atoms mixed in is a different story. It turns out that it takes a lot less energy to knock loose one of our "extra" phosphorous electrons because they aren't tied up in a bond their neighbors aren't holding them back. As a result, most of these electrons do break free, and we have a lot more free carriers than we would have in pure silicon.

The process of adding impurities on purpose is called doping, and when doped with phosphorous, the resulting silicon is called N-type ("n" for negative) because of the prevalence of free electrons. N-type doped silicon is a much better conductor than pure silicon is.

Each photon with enough energy will normally free exactly one electron, and result in a free hole as well. If this happens close enough to the electric field, or if free electron and free hole happen to wander into its range of influence, the field will send the electron to the N side and the hole to the P side. This causes further disruption of electrical neutrality, and if we provide an external current path, electrons will flow through the path to their original side (the P side) to unite with holes that the electric field sent there, doing work for us along the way. The electron flow provides the current, and the cell's electric field causes a voltage. With both current and voltage, we have power, which is the product of the two.

If you have a house with an unshaded, south-facing roof, you need to decide what size system you need. This is complicated by the facts that your electricity production depends on the weather, which is never completely predictable, and that your electricity demand will also vary. These hurdles are fairly easy to clear. Meteorological data gives average monthly sunlight levels for different geographical areas. This takes into account rainfall and cloudy days, as well as altitude, humidity, and other more subtle factors. You should design for the worst month, so that you'll have enough electricity all year. With that data, and knowing your average household demand (your utility bill conveniently lets you know how much energy you use every month),there are simple methods you can use to determine just how many PV modules you'll need.

Solar Panels and Spacecraft

Probably the most successful use of solar panels is on spacecraft, including most spacecraft that orbit the Earth and Mars, and spacecraft going to other destinations in the inner solar system. In the outer solar system, the sunlight is too weak to produce sufficient power and radioisotope thermal generators are used.

Photovoltaic concentrator solar arrays for primary spacecraft power are devices which intensify the sunlight on the photovoltaics. This design uses a flat lens, called a Fresnel lens, which takes a large area of sunlight and concentrates it onto a smaller spot. The same principle is used to start fires with a magnifying glass on a sunny day.

Research is underway to develop solar power satellites: space-based solar plants — satellites with large arrays of photovoltaic cells that would beam the energy to Earth using microwaves or lasers. Japanese and European space agencies have announced plans to develop such power plants in the first quarter of the 21st century.

Spacecraft are built so that the solar panels can be pivoted as the spacecraft moves. Thus, they can always stay in the direct path of the light rays no matter how the spacecraft is pointed. Spacecraft are usually designed with solar panels that can always be pointed at the Sun, even as the rest of the body of the spacecraft moves around, much as a tank turret can be aimed independently of where the tank is going. A tracking mechanism is often incorporated into the solar arrays to keep the array pointed towards the sun.

Solar panels need to have a lot of surface area that can be pointed towards the Sun as the spacecraft moves. More exposed surface area means more electricity can be converted from light energy from the Sun. Sometimes, satellite scientists purposefully orient the solar panels to "off point," or out of direct alignment from the Sun. This happens if the batteries are completely charged and the amount of electricity needed is lower than the amount of electricity made. The extra power will just be vented by a shunt into space as heat.

To date, solar power, other than for propulsion, has been practical for spacecraft operating no farther from the sun than the orbit of Mars. For example, Magellan, Mars Global Surveyor, and Mars Observer used solar power as did the Earth-orbiting, Hubble Space Telescope. For future missions, it is desirable to reduce solar array mass, and to increase the power generated per unit area. This will reduce overall spacecraft mass, and may make the operation of solar-powered spacecraft feasible at larger distances from the sun. The Rosetta space probe, launched March 2, 2004, will use solar panels as far as the orbit of Jupiter (5.25 AU); previously the furthest use was the Stardust spacecraft at 2 AU.

Solar concentrators put one of these lenses over every solar cell. This focuses light from the large concentrator area down to the smaller cell area. This allows the quantity of expensive solar cells to be reduced by the amount of concentration. Concentrators work best when there is a single source of light and the concentrator can be pointed right at it. This is ideal in space, where the Sun is a single light source. Solar cells are the most expensive part of solar arrays, and arrays are often a very expensive part of the spacecraft. This technology allows costs to be cut significantly due to the utilization of less material.

As opposed to chemical rockets, which are powered by a chemical reaction of the propellant, and uses the exhaust gases as reaction mass, some spacecraft propulsion methods have a method of expelling reaction mass powered by electricity. Either solar energy or nuclear energy is used. These methods typically have a higher specific impulse. The amount of reaction mass needed always grows exponentially with the delta-v to be produced, but more mildly if the specific impulse is high (but it should not be too high because for large specific impulse the power needed is proportional to it). With solar power the acceleration that can be produced is very low (much too low for a launch), but enduring. Typical burn times are months instead of minutes. The power the solar panel produces per kg, as an upper limit of the power the spacecraft has at its disposal per kg spacecraft (including solar panels) is an important factor. See also energy needed for propulsion methods.

Solar power for propulsion is currently used on the European lunar mission SMART-1 with a Hall effect thruster.

Solar array mass could be reduced with thin-film photovoltaic cells, flexible blanket substrates, and composite support structures. Solar array efficiency could be improved by using new photovoltaic cell materials and solar concentrators that intensify the incident sunlight.

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