Solar energy in households
The sun is an excellent source of energy. It would be good to use solar energy in your homes, especially today, as oil and gas prices continue to rise. Due to the high prices of fuel and gas, more and more people are experimenting with the use of solar energy in their homes in order to minimize the costs of basic utilities.
The energy of the sun can be exploited in different ways depending on how you would use the final product. There are so-called solar sensors that are placed on roofs or used in buildings. The main purpose of these solar collectors is to provide uniform heating and ventilation of homes and buildings. These sensors exploit the energy of the sun by magnifying the sunlight repeatedly and transferring that heat into the air or into the water. This air or heated water is stored and will provide heating of the building or house and hot water whenever necessary.
The only problem here is that not all places have the same amount of sun. The further you get from the equator, the lower the strength of the sun. Nevertheless, it is a much better solution than that based on electricity networks that do not reach isolated areas. It is simply a matter of properly storing the heat generated by the solar collector. For example, some buildings in Sweden used an underground storage facility in which solar energy was stored, thus saving money on heating the building and its water.
In areas where gas and fuel are out of the pockets of poor communities, residents must be able to rely on solar cooking for their meals. They use these cup-shaped discs equipped with mirrors or reflectors that direct all sunlight to the middle where a pot is placed. The same technology is used in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. This is a good alternative to conventional fuels such as coal, firewood and gas. They can use these solar stoves for a sunny day and use traditional fuels when the weather is not very lenient.
This dependence of communities on solar cooking should encourage many studies on how to make photovoltaic cells cheaper for an ordinary household. At present, the use of solar cells is not profitable for a single household. However, the approach here is to install a series of solar panels that would be shared by the entire community. This may be a good idea based on your use, but for basic lighting purposes, it might work in small, poor communities.
In some areas, community cooperatives have found ways to put electricity in homes out of reach of power grids. In the Philippines, for example, a local cooperative provided loans to households to install a basic solar module capable of producing enough electricity for three light bulbs. It may be laughable by our standards, but for those people who have lived all their lives with the flickering light of candles, three light bulbs make all the difference.
The story is the same in other countries. In Israel, the high costs of photovoltaic cells have slowed the growth of solar energy in the country. It is therefore fortunate that the Israeli government is now offering incentives to households using solar energy.
However, according to industry analysts, solar cell production costs will decrease as demand increases. In addition, most of them hope that recent discoveries and advances in technology will reduce the costs of using solar energy.
