Ray Boreham asked: It’s a fact that there are many advantages to implementing and using solar energy, but what are the top advantages of using solar? That’s actually a very subjective issue because one person’s major advantages may be another person’s major disadvantages, so we’ll take a look at what are generally regarded as the top advantages of solar and you can form your own opinion as to whether or not these would make your own list.
It’s Clean And Renewable
Solar energy comes from the sun so no fuel sources are needed to generate it and most of the more popular renewable energy systems produce little or no carbon emissions, making them about the cleanest source of energy available. The sun supplies us with energy each and every day in the form of light and heat, and even the wind results from the sun’s energy heating the Earth unevenly and cool air colliding with warm air, so it’s totally renewable.
Solar energy can be harnessed in various ways and most people are actually taking advantage of it every day already without even realizing it! It’s true. Let’s give you a little test just to demonstrate (one slight proviso here though – you must have drapes or blinds or some other type of covering over your windows; if not, pretend!).
When you get up in the morning, what’s one of the very first things you do? Open your drapes, right? If you answered in the affirmative, then you are actually making use of the sun’s energy via a process known as passive solar heating, which is a method of harnessing radiant heat from the sun streaming through windows for later use in material, such as concrete or water, known as thermal mass.
That’s just one example of how we’re able to harness the sun’s abundant energy freely with little or no effort. With a little planning and expenditure, both passive solar heating and cooling can be used to substantially offset one’s energy costs.
Free Energy – And Plenty Of It
The sun supplies us with energy in the forms of light and heat every day, 365 days a year, at no cost to us whatsoever. We’re generally a bit blase about the energy we get from the sun, taking for granted that it’s always going to be there. Fortunately, we don’t need to worry about it going away any time soon, but it would behoove us to take as much advantage of this free, abundant energy as possible while we can, just in case.
In fact, there’s so much surplus energy coming from the sun that, even if we were able to harness all the sun we could to power everything we use, there’d still be more energy left over than we’d know what to do with. We actually receive over six thousand times more energy from the sun in one hour than is used by the population of the whole planet in one year. So, even though we’re doing better at harnessing the sun’s energy, we’re really barely scratching the surface of what’s possible.
Take It With You When You Go
More and more applications are being found for solar nowadays, and the applications themselves are getting smaller all the time, so much so that practically everything you can do at home, you can now find a portable solar solution for.
Imagine if you’re out in the wilds or your car’s broken down somewhere in the middle of nowhere and you find your cell phone battery is dead. What do you do? Well, if you have a portable solar charger, you can attach it to your cell phone, wait a few minutes (as long as there’s plenty of sunlight) and you’ll be able to make a call to let loved ones know where you are or to have someone come to your rescue. How great is that?!!?!
If you have a laptop, there are solar laptop bags which will charge your laptop while it’s in the bag.
There are many other portable solar products available, including radios, shavers, cell phones, etc., and the number and variety of portable products available will only increase as the technology becomes more refined and sophisticated over time.
Whether or not you agree that these are the top advantages of using solar energy (it is, after all, a very subjective point of discussion), these are among the best and there are so many more advantages when it comes to using solar that they would probably fill a book.
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