Since ages the mankind has been curious to get the solar energy at night. They have adopted some methods and devised some procedures also for the purpose.
One of such procedures had been to store the energy of sun by utilizing it for pumping water uphill and later releasing that water to utilize its energy. A great way to store the suns energy is in solar panels from Roof Worx.
The other method adopted was compressing the water utilizing the solar energy and later de-compressing it.
But both of these methods discussed resulted into waste of energy and about 80 percent of the solar power put in is could be recovered.
If you use batteries for storing solar energy then also you are not going to get satisfactory result. They are very costly and not suitable for large-scale storage option.
If you are tired of all these efforts, just think of medium “Heat”. You can utilize this heat to generate electricity as in a solar-thermal power plant. Thus, by storing heat you can pause the process.
This procedure is very simple. First of all use the solar energy to heat some object. Keep that object in hot condition until the sun goes down. Thereafter, use that heat to form the steam which in turns run the turbine.
You must be aware that to store the extreme heat in order to run a solar-thermal power plant, the you need to keep the substance at sufficiently high temperature (at about 750 degrees F), otherwise you may be able to achieve the vaporization and pressure changes. It is also very necessary that the substance whose temperature is to raised is readily available and cheap.
With the constant and untiring efforts, the researchers has found that such a substance can be salt. It has the high melting point and very high vapor point. Besides its availability is unlimited in low-costs. The most important thing about it is that it loses only about 7 % of the energy supplied to it.
But, don’t get much excited and confused that you would be able to you will be able to do all these with your table salt. Actually, it is a different salt mixture – the combination of sodium and potassium nitrate and it is usually used as fertilizer. Such a plant has been established in Grenada of Spain.
This is not the end of expectations and experiments. The researchers all over the world are striving hard to discover and innovate technology, concepts and prototypes which is cost-effective, based on flexible materials and have the potential to harvest the solar with the purpose to work even when there is no sun and sunlight. Idaho National Laboratory has come up in this research and development field. This company is using nano antennas which nothing but embedding of square spirals of conducting metal onto a plastic sheet.
These nano antennas absorb UV light as well as infrared energy of sun. The infrared absorbed by these nano antennas include those reflected by earth surface too. With this combination of energy from the earth’s heat as well as from sunlight as well as, the nano antennas naturally have better efficiency than the conventional solar cells.
Thus, you can conclude that your solar panels can work at night also. Yes, it is possible. Irrespective of availability of sun, sunlight and night time or weather limitations (when sun is not there), you can generate and enhance your efficiency to utilize sunlight that was available earlier. In this way, you will get eco-friendly method of creating non-conventional power.