Put Mirrors On Solar Panels

There are eight heliostats on a pod with the mirrors motors operated by small two watt photovoltaic solar panels explained chief technology officer brad hines.

Put mirrors on solar panels.

The maximum energy production is achieved at midday when the sun reaches its maximum altitude on the horizon. A large increase of energy output at the system level by using mirrors could greatly change how solar panels are installed on solar farms during this time of artificially inflated prices for panels coming from outside the u s. It is used primarily in very large power plants and is not appropriate for residential use. In july i had my 1 5w panel running at double its rated power for twenty minutes it got so hot you couldn t touch it.

As i said earlier the more a solar panel is perpendicular to the sun s rays the more it produces electricity. 5 hours x 290 watts an example wattage of a premium solar panel 1 450 watts hours or roughly 1 5 kilowatt hours kwh. For the sake of example if you are getting 5 hours of direct sunlight per day in a sunny state like california you can calculate your solar panel output this way. While the hot water is typically used to drive a steam turbine you can also use it directly to heating buildings and for other purposes.

Thus the output for each solar panel in your array would. We therefore need to know during the year the maximum and minimum altitude of the sun at midday in order to discover how many degrees our panels have to be tilted. Pearce is a professor of engineering at michigan technological university. Here mirrors or lenses concentrate sunlight onto a small area often a central tower to produce heat.

You can use more mirrors to reflect more light onto the solar panel and increase it s power further but on a sunny summers day the extra light can build up a lot of heat that may damage the panel. Tenksolar is another u s. Company one with innovative solar panel technology that recently announced it is winding down operations unable to compete with the low cost chinese panels. The second technology is concentrating solar power or csp.

How much energy does a solar panel produce. The reflectors are placed opposite the solar panels to send more light toward the modules in front of them. You may also be interested in csp concentrated solar power. The light that hits them is reflected back toward the solar panels to produce more.