Residential Solar Energy:Build A Home Solar Panel

Building your own home Solar Panel is possible, if you know how! Click Here For Videos and More Information! Yes, you can build your own home solar panel, and see how the sun’s energy can be converted to electric. The most efficient panels are actually made with silicon, but you can build your own home solar panel by using cuprous oxide, a material known to cause light to be turned into electricity. Using a thin sheet of copper, you can get your cuprous oxide. Here's how:.

Click Here For Videos and More Information on home Solar Panel building!

Ok, here's what you need to make your own home solar panel: You will need about one square foot of thin copper plate, two alligator clips and short leads of wire, a wide mouth glass jar, tap water and salt. A voltmeter, which measures small amounts of electricity will detect the end result. Building your own solar panel means you will need some sort of electric stove or hot plate to heat the copper sheeting. Place the copper sheet on the burner and turn it on high and let it sit there for about 30 minutes. As it heats, you see the plate turn colors and the heat will show the outline of the heating coil underneath the plate. As it gets hotter it will start to turn a dark color until the whole sheet has a very dark, even black coating.

When the sheet is entirely black, turn off the burner and let it sit to cool for about 20 minutes. As the the cuprous oxide cools the black coating will begin to pop off the sheet, leaving a thinnish coating of red on the copper. This red coating is needed to build your own solar panel, and while the majority of the black can be rinsed off under running water, it should not be brushed clean.

Salt Water actually Helps Produce The Electricity for your home solar panel. By using the alligator clips, connect the copper sheet to one the top of one side of the glass jar. Attach the other clean copper sheet to the other side of the jar. Combine 2 tablespoons table salt into hot water, mix well, cool, making sure it dissolves and then pour it into the jar. Be cautious that the water does not get on the alligator clips. The two copper sheets should be under water with about 1 inch exposed at the top of the car to build your own solar panel.

Your home solar panel is almost done. Carefully, carefully, place the entire item in the sun-light, that means either through the window or outside ,exposed to the sun. If you were able to build your home solar panel, you can see the meter indicate the power being generated by sunlight. Using the voltmeter connect the leads to the two alligator clips. Now the sun's energy from your solar panel is yours to use! You can feel pride!!! Click Here For Solar Panel Videos and More Information

Our Energy Ravenous Planet Needs Renewable Resources

The globe as it is today is an energy hungry place and we need to be researching renewable supplies of energy to supply that thirst. We also need to get better ways of utilizing the present-day sustainable energy technology that are already in place. We should all be worried about the impact that is being put on our world and how the high cost of energy is affecting us. Regrettably a lot of energy is squandered every day and we need to take a look at ways we can be more conservative in our usage. We should open our eyes and make ourselves more conservative about our usage. There are working propositions to these concerns but how willing and able have people been to apply these solutions at the present.

One of the more popular forms of sustainable energy is wind power. The cost of the power it produces is getting very aggressive with conventional methods of energy output such as coal and natural gas. Power used to be created by windmills in the past on the family farm for many years. The rural landscape used to be spotted with them to provide power to pump water. It is a known fact nowadays that the states of Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota have adequate wind to furnish power for the whole U.S.

Another sustainable enegy source that has gotten much press is corn. The ethanol that is made from corn is a clean burning energy source and crops can be grown year after year so it is inexhaustible but at what price. The price of corn has gone up as the result of this, which is good for the farmer but bad for the consumer. There are better alternative to corn and one of them is prairie grass. In reality it generates more energy per acre than corn. Plus you don’t have to cultivate it because it grows wild. All you have to do is harvest and process it and no fertilizer or chemicals are used.

Solar power is another green energy source that we are hearing more about and seeing being utilized. You have the solar panels which convert sunlight into electricity and solar water heater to produce hot water. I recently read an article in a solar energy magazine about a family that installed a solar energy system on their home. They lived in Seattle. Of all the place in the world to put up a solar installation. Believe or not they had a respectable payback. Even though this is a very cloudy rainy area the ROI was almost unbelievable.

Solar power offers the chance for people to take charge of their own energy independence and self-sufficiency. This would allow a shift from centralized power production to decentralization. Think about it there hasn't been a lot of money spent on the research and development so costs remain high and the cause doesn't advance. It seems the corporate environment definitely like to be in control.

Regardless there are many alternatives that are now being explored because we know we can't stay dependent on the oil pipeline forever. We need to get smart about what we are doing with our energy situation and begin to implement a new energy agenda. We need to look to future generations and how it is going to benefit them. Do your part in helping to make renewable energy a bigger reality today.

You can learn more about solar panels, wind turbines , and other forms of sustainable energy sources by doing more research on the Net about the subject that intrigues. Be green and help keep the globe healthy and vibrant for future generations.

 

How Does Geothermal Energy Become Electricity

The main forms of renewable energy that most people see and hear about are solar energy and wind power, but there is another major power source that will soon be demanding attention. It has already been used to provide power to 1.2 million homes in the United States. It has far greater potential and to both heat and provide electricity to homes and is yet to be properly utilized. That's about to change.

Geothermal energy comes from a variety of sources of heat within the earth: the planet core, decay of naturally occurring substances within the crust and movement of continental plates as they slide against and underneath each other. Volcanoes, hot springs and steam vents represent the easily accessible points to this energy but most geothermal energy is trapped under the earth’s crust and must be accessed by drilling into the resource and harnessing the energy. The thermal energy in the uppermost 6 miles of the earth’s crust contains 50,000 times the energy of all the world’s gas and oil resources.

What Is Geothermal Energy?

Geothermal energy is the heat stored below the earth’s surface. In some parts of the world where the earth’s surface is cracked or thin, steam and molten rock can escape. These are usually locations of high seismic activity such as earthquakes and volcanoes. If water finds its way into these cracks, it becomes heated and may come to the surface as geysers, fumaroles, hot springs and mud pots.

Parts of USA, New Zealand, Japan and Europe have high geothermal activity. Electricity is generated using high grade geothermal energy such as geysers, mud pots, hot dry rocks and fumaroles. Geothermal energy can also be used as a heating source, for example in Iceland hot water is brought to the surface through a bore , then sent through insulated pipes into homes and radiator panels which provide heat. Over 80% of homes in Iceland are heated this way.

Although geothermal energy doesn’t pollute the air with greenhouse gases, there are other environmental concerns about its use. Scientists are not sure how the long-term use of this resource could affect our underground water supplies. Some geothermal tourist attractions at Rotorua in New Zealand have already suffered a decline in surface activity due to the draw-off of geothermal fluid from the underground reservoir by domestic and commercial uses.

Geothermal energy can be broken down into 4 main types – Geothermal energy can be broken down into 4 main types – hot dry rock, geopressured, hydrothermal and magma.

Hydrothermal

Hydrothermal is the only source used to generate commercially viable energy and is derived from hot water and steam formed in porous or fractured rock at relatively moderate depths from 100 metres to 5 kilometres.

The hot water and steam come from the intrusion of molten magma into the earth’s crust or the deep circulation and heating of groundwater through faults and fractures.

To generate electricity, hot water at temperatures ranging from 180 – 250 degrees Celsius is brought from the underground reservoir to the surface through production wells and is flashed to steam in special vessels by release of pressure. The steam is separated from the liquid and fed into a turbine engine which turns a generator. Ensuring the water levels are not depleted, the used geothermal water is returned to the reservoir.

Geopressured

Geopressured energy is derived from hot, pressurised waters containing dissolved methane, trapped at depths of three to six kilometres in sedimentary formations. The water temperature ranges from 90°C to 200°C.

Energy in 3 forms can be derived from geopressured sources – thermal energy from the hot water, hydraulic energy from the high pressure, and chemical energy from burning the dissolved methane.

Magma

The prospect of using magma directly has still not been exploited. Found at depths from between 3 and 10 kilometers below the earth's surface, magma is molten rock reaching temperatures up to 1200°C. Magma is only accessible where volcanic activity or tectonic plate movement occurs.

Hot Dry Rock

In certain cases granite at a depth of 3 to 5 kilometers under the earth's surface can get to 250°C. Unlike hydrothermal resources, the fractures and faults required to conduct water to the surface are not present, therefore water must be pumped into the rock at high pressure to create an artificial underground reservoir of steam or hot water.

A number of development projects continue into attempting to make use of hot dry rock to create electricity but factors such as cost and questions about resistance of the reservoir to flow, water loss and thermal drawdown remain. As the cost of producing geothermal using hot dry rock technology keeps coming down it will soon be an economically viable option.

The Future Prospect of Geothermal Energy in the US

An exciting new development in the future of geothermal energy in the United States has just been announced by the Department of the Interior who have promised to make 190 million acres of federal land available for geothermal power development. This is good news because the proposed land includes no environmentally sensitive areas such as national parks or designated wilderness areas.

An estimation of something like 5,500 MW of electricity from geothermal power will be generated by 2015. It’s a positive move that will promote a form of renewable energy that has been used for years, but perhaps not to its full potential.