SOLAR CELL, WIND ENERGY AND POLLUTION

[makam]

Pollution has become a serious problem fo all the world and world
leaders have awakened to the real problem after the signs of world
warming has become too obvious. US is the biggest polluter in the
world and now criticizes countries like India and China as the
polluters of the world.

Instead of burning fossilized fuels like coal and petroleum products
world has been experimenting with Wind energy and solar cells for
quite some time.

Wind energy has already been attempted and the State of Tamil Nadu is
the biggest benefactor of this clean energy and has a line of wind
generators and is able to get about 10 percent of its power
requirements from them.

Solar cells are having better advantage but their efficiency is not up
to mark and occupy huge areas for generating comparative power.
Presently thin layers of cells are being developed but are quite
expensive and economic power development from them is not feasible
economically. Also power cannot be generated directly from them. They
produce emf depending on the intensity of light falling on them and
depending on the emf generated a current flows from the solar cell to
a voltage regulator which keeps the voltage constant and will charge a
set of batteries. These batteries are in turn connected to an Inverter
which converts the DC voltage/ power into an AC voltage/power which
then can be used to do all the jobs same as the utility power.

The advantage is no fuel is burnt to produce power as in the case of
conventional power generation avoiding pollution. But again the power
generated will be of lower magnitude of about a few Megawatts . Even
this power generation requires huge land areas for positioning the
solar cell panels and associated mechanisms to change direction to
follow sun's movements.

But a small step will help in more investments in big scale and the
production of better efficient solar cells and fuel cells in the long
run.