DIY Solar Panels Blog

Hello and welcome to my blog on solar panels! I am an graduate engineering student with an interest in alternative energy technologies and in this blog I will be discussing different aspects of solar panel technology. I will be investigating the different do it yourself projects that are available and discuss ways of making them cheaper and more efficient. Before I start blogging about DIY solar panel projects I would like to initiate this blog with a short discussion regarding the motivation for this blog.

 Energy is one of the most valuable commodities in the world. The cost of this energy however is dictated by big business and foreign relations because the main source of energy comes from oil. Many sources of energy are available however and oil used simply out of technological convenience. As the oil supplies inevitably deplete the search for alternative energies ensues. For an alternative energy to be appropriate it must be cheap and technologically convenient. 

What do I mean by technologically convenient? It means that the technology that produces the energy must be reliable, easy to work with and it should work! But what exactly is the goal of this technology? If one were to take a purely "physics" perspective it becomes clear that energy is all around us. Molecules in gas are moving about chaotically with lots of energy and sometimes even less chaotically in the form of wind which is easier to capture. Electromagnetic radiation, for example in the form of radiowaves and light, are propagating around us constantly and contain a certain amount of energy. Have I lost you yet? The main point that I am trying to establish here is that energy is all around us however that energy is chaotic and difficult to capture. It is the goal of technology to capture this energy and target it towards some useful application, such as electrical energy production. Solar panels is one such technology. But why solar panels?

With the current infrastructure energy is produced at one location and distributed. An alternative method would be to produce energy at the location where it is required therefore eliminating the need to distribute the energy. The distribution of energy is a very inefficient process and is a major source of losses for energy companies. As a direct result of this, producing energy in your own home automatically increases efficiencies. I find DIY solar panels fascinating because they can be made at home and they are not very expensive. Some of the links that I will post on this blog will direct you to projects that I am investigating and will be talking about on here. Please feel free to join me on these projects and who knows maybe will we be energy independent in no time! Thanks for reading and please check back shortly for more in-depth analysis on solar panel projects!