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By Lee Devlin on July 25, 2008 10:45 AM | Comments (0) There are two common ways to collect energy from the sun. One is to use a thermal solar collector to gather the sun's heat and the other is to use a photovoltaic (PV) array which converts the sun's energy to electricity. Which is better? In the case of solar thermal, the conversion efficiency is much higher than PV. You can extract as much as 70% of the sun's energy with a solar collector, which is accomplished by circulating a fluid through a solar panel collector and capturing the heat rise that naturally occurs when the sun shines on the collector. On the other hand, a PV collector will only convert about 12% of the sunlight into electrical energy on average. A general rule of thumb is that the energy available from the sun is about 1kW per square meter. This... [read full story]
