You might take an interest in solar panels, especially because energy from the sun is good, and it’s a pretty dope industry. But you might be wondering how the technology and economics work. Did you ever think that solar panels were possible do due to freeing electrons from the sand around our feet?
95% of solar, or photovoltaic cells, are just little squares made from the element silicon.¹ A lot of these squares are placed beside each other to make panels. Silicon is made from silica, which makes up a large majority of the earth’s crust. It’s basically just the rocks and sand that’s all around us. People heat up this rocky stuff with fancy techniques, sometimes add a little bit of other stuff like boron, and boom, we’ve pretty much got the material for solar panels. It also plays a vital role in all of our tech, as computer chips are made from highly purified silicon.
Silicon is a semiconductor. When the sunlight shines down on it, some electrons become excited, and free to move around more.³ They can move to into the metal frames and flow through them to the wiring. That’s how energy gets from panels to house.
The energy is in a form called Direct Current, or DC. This just means that the electrons travel in a straight path. Houses use something called Alternating Current, or AC, where the electrons vibrate in place…
