Isn't it a wonderful idea to get energy absolutely free of charge. And know it will stay like that forever. Electricity from solar panels, warm water from a solar boiler, or cooling from your solar air-conditioning, is absolutely free of charge.

The sun is our inexhaustible super energy plant. Contrary to fossil energy it is endless, its clean there are no CO2 emissions responsible for global warming.

Solar- or Photovoltaic Panels are silent, clean and hardly need maintenance. With a life span of about 40 years they will keep on working for you day in and day out. They can be used everywhere you need electrical energy.

Solar Panels can be easily installed on the roof top of most houses. They are very reliable because the photovoltaic effect is a process without any moving parts. A few panels your rooftop are synonymous to a guaranteed supply of DC current for the years to come. The installation of a solar panel is simple, but when you are planning on placing a few of them in an array you will need expertise or a certified installation company.

Depending on the dimensions of your panel a 125 Wp panel will approximately supply 4.5 Amperes at 25 Volts. Join 4 together and you end up at about 100 Volt at 4, 4 Amperes. Without any additional measures that is rather useless.

There are two options to overcome this difficulty. You can charge batteries and convert the battery power to the AC current you need. Or you can immediately convert the DC from your panels and connect to the grid and use the public system as your reservoir.

In our first installation you will need a regulator that takes care of the proper charging of your expensive batteries. Then to you will need to invert your DC battery power to an AC current to feed your appliances. The device that takes care of transforming DC to AC is simply called “the inverter” The second solution calls for a specialized grid inverter that is responsible for the transformation of the power coming from your solar array to something within the specifications of your electricity company.

Grid connected systems are no solution for power failures since they will shut off immediately when the grid power drops below a minimum. This might seem a nuance at first but imagine the electrical engineer feelings. He assumes to be working on powerless grid. Then the sun rises and you and you neighbors start to feed the system he is working on with AC current.

Besides the feelings of our electrical engineer there is the fact that you are operating a power plant. If the main supplier of electricity is off-line, you and a few others will get the full load of the whole grid on your system. And believe me you won't be able to feed the Bay Area from your rooftop. In practical terms this means that the system short circuits.

Apart from these apparent difficulties Solar, Wind and Motion energy are truly a truly free and inexhaustible reservoir of energy. We still have to overcome some gaps in our knowledge on how to harness it all. But the enormous amounts of unlimited power available to us though nature are in sharp contrast to the difficulties we face with conventional energy sources.

Hans is author at http://www.alternative-energy-guide.com