Solar Power: The Green Alternative

If you look at the closest subdivision that’s in your neighborhood, you’ll notice something about the construction of the homes, and that’s the fact that they all look the same, but there’s more to it than that. Not only are they all basically the same, but they all run off the same power sources as well. High electricity bills, air pollution, and a house that can’t function in a winter storm power outage are a few of the consequences of our modern reliance on the types of power we use.

But of course there are alternatives, and one of the best of these is the single most predictable climatic element of any building site, the sun. Many ecologists feel that the only sensible course to take given the state of our resources on this planet, is to go with solar power. They believe that any of the naysaying that surrounds this issue comes from the fact that there is a general ignorance of the subject matter or service to some special interest group.

There are three kinds of solar energy that are of particular interest and the first of these is called passive solar energy. This method deals with dealing directly with the sun’s energy by inviting it into or blocking it directly out of a certain building.

Active solar energy refers to storing the sun’s energy and then moving it for storage to another part of the building. An example is called hydronic floor heating which uses a liquid that’s heated on the roof of a building and then pumped to a storage tank where it’s pumped to pipes in the floor that create the heat. Another type of active solar energy is called photovoltaics. This is the conversion of direct sunlight collected outside the building into electricity used inside the building.  The third kind of solar energy uses what is stored in the form of plant and animal tissue and doesn't really have a name.

A good example of passive solar energy would be a porch with an overhead that would block the most extreme of the sun's rays in summer, thereby helping the cooling process.  Uncovered windows on the building’s south side would allow the sun’s rays to come in during the winter months and in this way the construction of the home would allow for the sun to help heat the home during the winter. The solar panels that are familiar to many of us are the tools that we use to store solar energy actively, and the heat that wood gives off during a fire is an example of the kind of solar energy that’s stored in plant or animal tissue.

As many of our resources dwindle, more and more people are looking to the sun as a source on limitless energy that we can use as an alternate to the ones we’re using now.  

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