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In this study, load characteristics of thermoelectric and photovoltaic solar panels areinvestigated and compared with each other with experiments. Thermoelectric solar panels convertsthe heat generated by sun directly to electricity; while, photovoltaic solar pales converts photonicenergy from sun to electricity. In both types, maximum power can be obtained when the loadresistance is equal to internal resistance. According to experimental results, power generated fromunit surface with thermoelectric panel is 30 times greater than the power generated by photovoltaicpanel. From a panel surface of 1 m2, thermoelectric solar panel has generated 4 kW electric power,while from the same surface, photovoltaic panel has generated 132 W only.

In the fight against climate change, renewable energy has been subsidised in many countries. With the costs passed onto consumers, governments are paying those, for example, who instal domestic solar panels on top of their homes and feed electricity back into the system at preferential rates. We know that substantial amounts of income flow into households with solar installations as a result, but we do not know much about the political consequences of these programmes. Similar government programmes are known to have resource and interpretative effects on participants, leading to changes in their attitudes. Drawing on three longitudinal surveys from Germany, United Kingdom, and Switzerland, this article analyses whether installation of these solar panels causes meaningful changes in households' various political attitudes. Using fixed-effect models as the identification strategy, the article reports null results – solar installations do not seem to generate political attitudes. This is good as well as bad news for actors looking to increase the amount of renewable energy produced through solar installations.

The rising price of fossil fuels, government incentives and growing public aware-ness for the need to implement sustainable energy supplies has resulted in a large in-crease in solar panel installations across the country. For many sites the most eco-nomical solar panel installation uses existing, southerly facing rooftops. Adding solar panels to an existing roof typically means increased loads that must be borne by the building-s structural elements. The structural design professional is responsible for ensuring a new solar panel installation is properly supported by an existing structure and configured to maximize energy generation.

In 2017, Bahrain's Cabinet endorsed the country's first national renewable energy action plan. The plan included the installation of residential solar photovoltaic cells as a means of using renewable energy in government-built housing units. This was followed by the establishment of the country's first photovoltaic solar panel manufacturing company and the introduction of a net metering policy. However, public acceptance of residential solar panels has not been researched. This study aimed to address this gap through the distribution of an online survey. A total of 764 complete responses were received. The results showed a considerable number of respondents were interested in installing solar panels. However, the respondents recognized several challenges in both buying and installing them, including capital cost, lack of information, and maintenance requirements. This study's findings offer insights on how the public perceives solar panels, along with issues the government needs to address to ensure successful public participation in the use of solar energy in the residential sector in Bahrain.

Today, the increasing use of solar energy contributes to the EU's energy policies. Increasing use of renewable energy sources reduces pollutant emissions, dependence on fossil fuels and improves air quality. Globally, installed photovoltaic capacity has reached 400 GW by the end of 2017, and is projected to reach 4,500 GW by 2050. In the context of this research, we would like to present a detailed presentation of the possibilities and effects of integrating solar systems into electricity networks. The integration of renewable energies into networks is of paramount importance to researchers because of current energy demand and the depletion of fossil fuel reserves and environmental impacts. In this study, we highlight the effects of solar network integration on both the solar system and the public utility service. We also report on the opportunities and impacts of integration in Hungary in connection with our research. Today, solar panels are the cornerstone of sustainable development.

Brazil has a huge area with constant and long solar exposition. The country is already facing some energy bottlenecks and need to expand its energy matrix. In this context the implementation of photovoltaic solar panels, in houses' rooftops, is a viable initiative that should be encouraged by government. This paper proposes a public policy intervention to incentive the use of photovoltaic solar panels. It provides an analysis of Brazilian background, further consumption and planning, the policy intervention, the needed tools, political feasibility and implementation. The logic model will be used showing the main inputs, activities and results. The data was collected from official sources. The main limitation is the missing mathematical approach in the cost-benefit analysis that can be extended in the future. The paper presents a new approach to the energetic problem in Brazil and shows that the proposal is feasible with some goodwill from authorities.

The European Union and China are the two countries that have advantages in each of them. The European Union and China have a dispute regarding renewable energies, namely the problem with solar panels. China's policy of making solar panels prices have low bargaining power makes the European Union unable to accept the policy because it can cause a long trade conflict. The case study in this paper also illustrates that the EU is actively approaching it to overcome environmental challenges in China by involving the European Union in dialogue and negotiation on various issues and providing capacity-building support. China also introduced trade reforms and carbon emissions to environmental decision-making bodies in the European Union, and it was supported by the European Union, including through meetings to determine sustainable policies and development projects on energy and the environment. Keywords: EU – China dispute, Environmental Challenges, anti-dumping, China's policy, World Trade Organization.

With the predicted results of climate change looming, humanity must do all it can to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Maintaining a habitable environment along with the high quality of living associated with developed nations requires investment in renewable energy. Because national governments often fail to make responsible decisions for their country's future, this burden falls to institutions like UMass Amherst. Although costly investments like solar panels substantially improve the sustainability of campus, some innovative improvements of existing solar energy infrastructure can go a long way. For example, when solar panels heat up they lose photovoltaic efficiency. We propose that UMass institute cooling systems on current and future solar panel structures. This may sound extravagant, but in this paper we outline a plan for a simple and affordable cooling system that can be constructed from supplies bought at a local hardware store. The University spent approximately $1.5 million dollars on the new solar canopy atop the Robsham's Visitor Center. This structure generates an estimated $40,000 worth of electricity each year, with a 38 year return on investment. We expect a cooling system for each canopy to cost around $500 and to improve power output by more than 10 percent. This means that by the most conservative estimate, a $500 investment will generate an additional $4,000 worth of electricity, reducing the return on investment time by 4 years. Compared with the initial solar canopy investment, this magnitude of electricity generation would have cost $150,000. By comparison, $500 is peanuts. Read on to see how a little ingenuity can go a long way to save money and the environment.

AbstractMotivated by a widely practiced strategy to combine the growth of the solar energy sector with poverty mitigation, we propose stylized models of households selling extra solar energy back to the grid, which generates a steady stream of income to overcome adoption barriers for solar panels, that is, high adoption cost and generation variability. By considering households' strategic consumption shifting behavior in response to varying intertemporal market electricity prices, we have presented the equilibrium adoption number and households' equilibrium profit. We have also demonstrated the government's optimal subsidy to reach a socially optimal adoption level. Furthermore, we investigate the popular Public Private Partnership (PPP) model in developing countries to promote the investment of solar panels. Under the PPP program, the private firms share both upfront cost and electricity revenue with households, while the government may provide subsidy to further encourage adoption. Despite the popularity of the PPP scheme, our model documents an unexpected negative implication by inducing a lower overall adoption level than the traditional scheme: As the PPP scheme relieves budgetary burden of households in adopting solar panels (infrastructure cost), anticipating the long‐term revenue loss, they are less likely to participate in the first place. However, combined with the government intervention via adoption subsidy, the PPP scheme can lead to a win‐win solution for all.

Solar panels can be found practically all over the world and represent a standard surface that can be colonized by microbial communities that are resistant to harsh environmental conditions, including high irradiation, temperature fluctuations and desiccation. These properties make them not only ideal sources of stress-resistant bacteria, but also standard devices to study the microbial communities and their colonization process from different areas of Earth. We report here a comprehensive description of the microbial communities associated with solar panels in Berkeley, CA, United States. Cultivable bacteria were isolated to characterize their adhesive capabilities, and UV- and desiccation-resistance properties. Furthermore, a parallel culture-independent metagenomic and metabolomic approach has allowed us to gain insight on the taxonomic and functional nature of these communities. Metagenomic analysis was performed using the Illumina HiSeq2500 sequencing platform, revealing that the bacterial population of the Berkeley solar panels is composed mainly of Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Proteobacteria, as well as lower amounts of Deinococcus-Thermus and Firmicutes. Furthermore, a clear predominance of Hymenobacter sp. was also observed. A functional analysis revealed that pathways involved in the persistence of microbes on solar panels (i.e., stress response, capsule development, and metabolite repair) and genes assigned to carotenoid biosynthesis were common to all metagenomes. On the other hand, genes involved in photosynthetic pathways and general autotrophic subsystems were rare, suggesting that these pathways are not critical for persistence on solar panels. Metabolomics was performed using a liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) approach. When comparing the metabolome of the solar panels from Berkeley and from Valencia (Spain), a very similar composition in polar metabolites could be observed, although some metabolites appeared to be differentially represented (for example, trigonelline, pantolactone and 5-valerolactone were more abundant in the samples from Valencia than in the ones from Berkeley). Furthermore, triglyceride metabolites were highly abundant in all the solar panel samples, and both locations displayed similar profiles. The comparison of the taxonomic profile of the Californian solar panels with those previously described in Spain revealed striking similarities, highlighting the central role of both selective pressures and the ubiquity of microbial populations in the colonization and establishment of microbial communities. ; Financial support from the Spanish Government (Grant Helios, Reference: BIO2015-66960-C3-1-R co-financed by FEDER funds and Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades) is acknowledged. Work performed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under the Office of Science Early Career Program (awarded to TN) and at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, and with use of resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231. ; Peer reviewed

AbstractThis research is concerned with performing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to investigate the air flow and dust deposition behavior around a ground-mounted solar PV panel. The discrete phase model (DPM) is adopted to model the gas-solid flow. The influence of the wind speed, the dust particle size, and the dust material on the dust deposition rate was investigated based on the environment of Cairo, Egypt. The wind speeds range between 1 and 11.5 m/s with an average of 3.7 m/s. It is found that increasing the wind speed decreases the dust deposition rate. For wind speeds higher than 2 m/s, it is found that increasing the dust particle diameter or the dust density increases the dust deposition rate. For wind speeds lower than 2 m/s, it is found that there is a critical particle size before which increasing the dust density causes dust deposition rate to increase and after which increasing the dust density decreases the dust deposition. The maximum percentage of deposition rate equals 10.8% and occurs for the dolomite dust material at a wind speed of 2 m/s and particles diameter of 150 μm.