For a long time, I wondered how solar lights worked behind the scenes.
Funnily enough, just a few days ago, our class was fortunate to get to learn about it from our teacher.
Because I thought that his explanation was so clear and made a lot of sense to me, I want to share that information with other people who might be in a similar situation - wondering how it all works.
Hence, as a result I'm writing this article to enlighten the curious minds out there.
Firstly, I want to point out that solar energy is a kind of renewable energy, which is energy that's generated from the natural resources around us.
In this case, the natural source is the sun.
Aside from solar, other types of renewable energy that you might be already familiar with include biomass, wind power and hydroelectricity.
Out of these examples, solar energy ranks quite low in popularity.
As you can obviously guess, solar power involves somehow capturing and the harnessing energy from the light of the Sun.
So the next question then becomes - how do you convert this light into something useful? Well, there are two categories of methods.
There is the direct and the indirect method.
I'll touch on both of these.
With the direct method (or photovoltaics), solar cells are firstly used to collect the light coming from the Sun.
This captured light is then converted into direct current electricity.
For this method to be effective, the solar cells need to be appropriately facing the sun as long as there is sunlight to maximize amount of energy collected.
To help in this regard, solar trackers can work in conjunction to automatically move the panels favorably in the direction of the Sun.
The second system involves lenses working together with a tracking system (similar to solar trackers) and focusing the large area of sunlight into a small concentrated beam of light.
Without much surprise, this method is called the concentrating solar power system, or CSP system for short.