Solar energy generation & utilization:-

Abstract
Solar energy in terms of thermal Solar Hot Water systems and electricity
producing Photovoltaics contribute at present only to the global energy supply at a
fraction of 1 %.
However, the potential for solar energy is immense: the earth receives in 1
hour from thesun the equivalent of the present annual global energy supply.Solar
energy is one of the emerging renewable energy technologies still not competitive,
but exhibiting both technical and economic potential to be so inside 10-15 years.
There isbasically no necessary “technology jumps” as prerequisites, but such a
development will demand a favorable political climate.

Growing political awareness, driven partly by environmental concerns partly

by concerns about security of energy supply, of the need to promote solar energy and
renewables, e.g. on global level spurred on by the recent UN/IPCC report and on an
EU level by the EC commitment to reach 20 % renewables in the electricity supply by
2010 and 20 % renewables in the overall energy production by 2020, appears to
ensure the necessary future political support for renewables, but not necessarily for
solar energy technologies, in particular photovoltaics’s, which is still not yet
competitive to other renewables although exhibiting a tremendous potential.

A photovoltaic (PV) power system having distributed square wave current DC

to AC inverters integral with strings of PV cells in a PV array. The PV array is
arranged into four quadrants and phase-shifted and summed AC voltages from each
quadrant are further summed in a 12-phase to 3-phase transformer to produce a
sinusoidal 3-phase AC voltage with a total harmonic distortion of less than 5 percent.

A system for heating water using solar energy comprises a photovoltaic array,
a water heater comprising a variable resistive load, and a controller for varying either
the load characteristics of the resistive load or the power generating characteristics of
the photovoltaic array, or both, to ensure maximum power transfer efficiency.