Benefits Of Solar Energy

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Renewable energy is on demand in today’s global energy and innovation. It shows promising solution to current effort on tackling world energy problem of growing consumption and solution for a greener environment. Many developing countries is now widely researching on renewable energy based generating system to replace fossil fuel and coal based generating system. Solar energy emerges as the primary research among all other source of renewable energy due to its vast benefit. Solar energy is defines as energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation generated by the sun through thermonuclear fusion that converts hydrogen to helium (Brown, 1988). The three main benefits of solar energy are ease of access, environment friendly and cost effective …show more content…

It is available in most parts of the world. Region that receives the highest intensity of solar radiation known as ‘sun-belt’ is very suitable for the use of solar energy (Lorenzini, Biserni, & Flacco, 2010). The areas mentioned by Lorenzini et al. (2010) consist of south and north America continent, Africa continent, Asia continent and south-east Asia continent. Unlike solar energy, fossil fuel and coal are only available in certain region and will eventually depletes. On the other hand, wind energy and tidal energy are also source of renewable energy but they have their limitations and offsets based on geological factor and period or season compare to availability of solar energy all year round. In Malaysia, solar energy resources is abundant due to its geological location near the equator (Ong, Bashir, & Kao, 2015). Ong et al. (2015) stated that the average daily solar intensity is 5kWh/m2 with an average daily sunshine duration about 12 hours. This contributes Malaysia as a very potential location for wide implementation of solar …show more content…

Friendliness of solar energy to the global environment can be explained in term of global greenhouse effect, and byproducts released. Solar energy along with other renewable energy plays a big role in minimizing greenhouse effect. Most of the traditional energy generating system affects local climate and interferes with Earth’s overall heat balance due to the net addition of heat into the atmosphere during electric generation process (Aubrecht, 2006). Combustion of traditional sources of energy like fossil fuel increases the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere which induces a heightened greenhouse effect and warming of the earth (“Renewable Energy”, 2015). In the other hand, Aubrecht (2006) stated that all solar energy devices redistribute thermal energy from one place to another and do not release additional thermal energy to the atmosphere. Instead of releasing excess heat energy into the atmosphere, solar devices only change the form of solar energy from heat or light into electricity and thus maintain the heat balance of the atmosphere. Solar devices like solar cells and concentrating solar thermal plants (CSP) uses photovoltaic effect and solar thermal method to generate electricity. According to Bockris (2009), solar light is focused on a boiler by the use of mirrors to increase the temperature of water inside the boiler in order to vaporize the water into steam to drive the

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