Solar Cell Technology - How Solar Energy Works

The sun's light (and all light) contains energy. When light hits an object the energy turns into heat. The heat or warmth that you can actually feel is caused when the energy or solar radiation makes the atoms on your arm "excited" and they start to jiggle and bump into eachother. The trick is to get the atoms to actually move from one point to another rather than sit in the same place just jiggling. The whole point to solar energy is to do just that. Exicte atoms with solar energy and get them to move as a current into a battery which than tranfers the power to your home or any other device that runs on electricity.

When this solar energy comes into contact with certain materials like silicon crystals, the energy turns into a electrical current that we can harness. This happens because when light hits silicon crystals it causes the electrons in the crystal to get up and move instead of just jiggling in place to make heat. These currents then flow over a conductor (usually a piece of metal) into a battery that can store the energy. By providing material to split the positive and negative charge the energy can be stored and transferred to any electrical device. 

The problem is that these large silicon crystals are expensive, because they are hard to grow. Newer materials use crystals that are cheaper to produce and are smaller. These material can be shaped into "flexible films". These solar flexible films allow for small solar cells to be produced, that then can be placed on plastic material.

One example of these materials is copper-indium-gallium-selenide. Thin-Film solar cells may be the answer: One recently converted 19.9 percent of the sunlight that hit it into electricity, surpassing the amount converted into power by mass-produced traditional silicon photovoltaics and offering the potential to unleash this renewable energy source. Experts have found that they are able get energy with one or two mircrons of film and still absorb 98 percent of the sunlight.(In other words, it takes at least 100 times less thin-film material to absorb the amount of sunlight as traditional silicon photovoltaic cells.) This means smaller cells that are more energy efficient that can be placed on to consumer products such as solar spot lights that are small and are able to stay illuminated through out the night with little direct sunlight.