What Is Solar Energy?

Solar energy is the radiant energy transmitted to the earth from the sun. It has provided, either directly or indirectly almost all of the sources of energy on earth since the formation of the planet. Analysis shows that most forms of energy used today originated from the sun except for nuclear and tidal energy. Solar energy is very attractive because it is non polluting, non depletable, reliable, and free. The solar energy can be used in the heating of buildings, producing electricity directly from the sun, for the drying of food, for fuel, and for obtaining salt from brine (Schwaller and Gilbert, 1997). Through time, architecture has evolved to take advantage of the sun for heating or take refuse from it for coiling. In other words, solar

It has been estimated that a yearly average of about 2,300KWh/m2 of solar energy tails on a horizontal surface in Nigeria, and that in Lagos the intensity of solar radiation is about 930W/m2 on a clear sunny day (FMST, 1987). At the international institute for tropical agriculture at Ibadan, incident solar energy varies from 5.1KWh/m2/day during the least favourable day in August to 5.8KWh/m2/day in March and April. What Nigeria requires is an affordable solar energy technology and cheap appliances. Nigeria has within a high sunshine belt and thus has enormous solar energy potentials. Solar radiation is fairly well distributed with average solar radiation of about 19.8MJ/m2/day and average sunshine hours of 6 hours per day. If solar collectors or modules were used to cover 1% of Nigeria’s land area, it is possible to generate 1850 x 103GWh of solar electricity per year; this is over one hundred times the current grid electricity consumption level in the country (Uzoma Et.al,

Similarly, it has an annual average daily solar radiation of about 5.25KW/m2/day, varying between about 3.5KW/m2/day at the Northern boundary. Nigeria receives about 4.851x1012KWh of energy per day from the sun. This is equivalent to about 1.082 million tons of oil equivalent per day and is about four thousand times the current daily crude oil reduction, and about 13,000 times that of natural gas daily production based on energy unit. This huge energy resource from the sun is available for about 26% only of the day. According to Garba and Bashir (2002), the country is also experiencing some cold and dusty atmosphere during the harmattan, in its Northern part, for a period of about four months (November-February) annually. The dust has an attenuating effect on the land area of 924x103Km2 for the country and an average of 5.535KWh/m2/day, Nigeria has an average of 1.804 x 1015KWh of incident solar energy annually. This annual solar energy insolation value is about 27 times the nation total conventional energy resources in energy units and is over 117, 0000 times the amount of electric power generated in the country. In other words, about 3.7% only of the national land area is needed to be utilized in order to obtain annual collection from the sun an amount of energy equal