Solar in sentence

1475 examples of Solar in a sentence

That's why it is possible to use existing solar cells on the roof of a hut to act as a broadband receiver from a laser station on a close by hill, or indeed, lamp post.

And It really doesn't matter where the beam hits the solar cell.

And the same is true for translucent solar cells integrated into windows, solar cells integrated into street furniture, or indeed, solar cells integrated into these billions of devices that will form the Internet of Things.

Consider the planet Venus in our solar system.

Hollywood movies like to pick on our sun by showing Earth destroyed by solar flares or the sun dying out, which would cause Earth to freeze.

Gigantic solar flares can mess with our satellites and electrical equipment, but the chances of it killing you are pretty slim.

Our solar system is on the edge of the Milky Way while the nearest supermassive black hole is about 26,000 light years from Earth.

We know from ice core research that the transition from these cold conditions to warm conditions wasn't smooth, as you might predict from the slow increase in solar radiation.

From these lessons from our own solar system, we've learned that a planet's atmosphere is crucial to its climate and potential to host life.

We have some good reasons to completely switch over to solar power.

So why don't we replace these traditional plants with solar energy?

Because there's one factor that makes solar power very unpredictable: cloud cover.

And those rays that first get reflected by a surface, like a nearby building, before reaching the solar energy system are called reflected irradiance.

But before we can examine how clouds affect the sun's rays and electricity production, let's see how these solar energy systems work.

First up, we have solar towers.

But when we say solar energy systems, we're usually talking about photovoltaics, or solar panels, which are the systems most commonly used to generate solar power.

In solar panels, photons from the sun's rays hit the surface of a panel, and electrons are released to get an electric current going.

Solar panels can use all types of irradiance, while solar towers can only use direct irradiance, and this is where clouds become important because depending on their type and location relative to the sun, they can either increase or decrease the amount of electricity produced.

For instance, even a few cumulus clouds in front of the sun can reduce the electricity production in solar towers to almost zero because of this dependence on direct rays.

In solar panels, those clouds would decrease energy output as well, though not as much because solar panels can use all types of irradiance.

Due to reflection, or a particular phenomeon called Mie scattering, the sun's rays can actually be focused forward by clouds to create a more than 50% increase in the solar irradiance reaching a solar panel.

If this potential increase isn't accounted for, it could damage the solar panel.

In solar towers, huge tanks of molten salt or oil can be used to store any excess heat and use it when needed, so that's how they manage the problem of fluctuating solar irradiance to smooth out electricity production.

But in the case of solar panels, there currently isn't any way to affordably store extra energy.

That's where traditional power plants come in because to correct for any fluctuations in these solar powered plants, extra electricity from traditional sources always needs to be available.

For this reason, a lot of researchers are interested in forcasting the motion and formation of clouds through satellite images or cameras that look up at the sky to maximize the energy from solar power plants and minimize energy waste.

Perhaps one day, we'll see gold rushes to tap the mineral wealth of the other planets of our solar system.

I'm a big advocate of changing the lightbulbs and buying hybrids, and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house, and dug the geothermal wells, and did all of that other stuff.

But geothermal, concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency and conservation.

So far we've sent a single spacecraft outside our solar system, trudging along at 0.006% of the speed of light.

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