Are you considering solar panels for your home, but curious about how they work? This article will give you a quick overview of how solar panels conduct electricity. This will include what solar panels are made of, how they are assembled, and why it generates electricity.
Solar panels are made up of photovoltaic cells. A photovoltaic cell is a semiconductor and is generally made up of the element silicon. A semiconductor is a material that will only conduct electricity after power has been put into the system. You can think of this like a golf ball. A golf ball will happily sit in the same spot, until you give it some energy, much like hitting it with a golf club. With that added energy, the golf ball will fly through the air.
Going back to our solar panel, when light hits our silicon cell, it will give the silicon atoms enough energy for one of the electrons to be released from the silicon atom. But that’s just the beginning of the process.
Once the electron is free, it looks for somewhere it can go to become stable again, and without further influence, it will simply find a hole from another electron that was released and settle there. This is a random process and by itself will not generate electricity.
To really create a flow of electricity, we need to have an electric field, and to do that, we use a positive layer of silicon right next to a negative layer of silicon.
Before I get ahead of myself, to create those positive and negative layers of silicon, you’ll need to add something to the silicon. Silicon itself is electrically neutral, but simply adding phosphorus to one sheet and boron to the other will give each sheet of silicon a total negative and positive charge (respectively).
Now that we have our positive and negative layers, right where the two layers meet, an electric field will be created. This field will give the free electrons a general direction to follow in the cell (i.e., toward the positive), rather than moving around randomly.
If you connect the positive and negative wafers of silicon in an electrical circuit, electrons will flow through the circuit and electricity will be created.
Each solar cell doesn’t make a lot of electricity, but if you connect a bunch of solar cells together, you can make a lot of power. It is not uncommon for people to power their entire home with solar energy.
