Solar Panels, Solar Technology, and Solar Energy

Welcome to Darocasolar.com! This site is dedicated to providing the most up to date information available about solar power, both photovoltaic and thermal. Regardless if you want to know more about solar panels; or if you want to know more about solar water heaters, you have come to the right place. Our site is not a sales pitch, and we do not mention or endorse any specific products. Rather our aim is to arm you, the consumer, with the information you need to make smart decisions. If you have any questions, you want to know more about something on this site, or would like information on a pertinent topic we don’t cover here, please feel free to email us. And don’t forget to check back often, we’re constantly updating!

Solar power has a longer history than most would imagine. The first solar cell was actually created in 1883 by Charles Fritts. He took the element selenium and coated it with a thin layer of gold. Selenium was known to be a semiconductor, and it has the strange property of conducting better in light than in darkness. This is known as photoconductivity, and it puzzled scientists initially.

Fritts took the bold step of coating the semiconductor with a fully conductive material. The completed cell produced a current when light struck it. The amount of current produced was extremely weak, around 1% of the power that struck the cell. That meant that sunlight couldn’t even turn on a ten watt light bulb.

The development of solar power has come in fits and bursts. The potential for an efficient solar cell seemed so minute that it was left to sit largely unattended until the space race began. The space race was a technological game of one upping that was engaged in by the USA and USSR following World War II. Solar panels seemed to be a good fit for spacecraft because they required no fuel to run, and were powered by the one thing that space has in more abundance than the earth, sunlight. The fuel issue was particularly vital, as the cost of putting anything weighty into space becomes prohibitive.

Space applications aside, solar power seemed like it would never be able to compete with other forms of power generation on earth. The panels created couldn’t even recoup the energy that went into making them before they broke down! This is due to the high energy cost of extracting silicon from silica, or sand. For decades solar cells couldn’t seem to exceed a ceiling of 3-4 years before breaking down. It was not until the past 10 years that advances have been made that allow a solar panel to last longer than ten years. This allows them to produce more energy than they cost to make, which is the first hurdle that needed to be overcome for them to be a viable energy source.

The second hurdle is for them to be competitively priced. Currently, they are actually less expensive than other forms of power; however this is only when they last more than 7 years in some cases. The other major issue is that with other means, like public utilities, you pay for 7 years of power over the span of 7 years. With solar panels the entire cost is paid up front, which can lead to a surprisingly large price tag.

 In developed countries it is still relatively expensive compared to grid supplied power, they are roughly equivalent as long as you can plan for the long term, but few people are capable of doing that it seems. However it truly shines in areas that do not have a power grid installed. A power grid requires sufficient electrical consumption over an area to warrant the infrastructure investment, and in many areas of the world that simply doesn’t exist. However an item like a water purifier, or a telephone, can be stand alone and completely solar powered, providing an area with a much needed service.

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