What are the Benefits of Going Solar?
The benefits of solar power
Using the Sun to power your home can help reduce your electricity bills and your carbon footprint. Giving you access to a renewable and clean source of energy, we take a look at how a solar power system can benefit your home. It doesn’t matter if it’s summer or winter, throughout the year our country bakes under the relentless sun.
Australia is not called the Sunburnt Country for nothing: we experience more solar radiation per square kilometre on average than anywhere else in the world. The Sun gives us 10,000 times the energy annually than Australian’s consume in a yearii. Solar panels allow us to make the most of this incredibly large and renewable source of energy Solar electricity panels capture the Sun’s energy and convert it into electricity that we can use in the home to power our appliances.
The panels, comprised of photovoltaic (PV) cells, are usually mounted onto a home’s roof and oriented in a way that maximises their exposure to the Sun’s light. When the sunlight hits them, they generate electricity. An inverter is used to convert the energy into AC electricity that you can use in your home Energy from the Sun can also be used to warm your water and to heat your homei.
Heating water can account for up to one third of a typical home electricity billv and so even just heating your household’s water with a solar hot water system can make a difference to the amount of energy that you draw from the grid. And it seems that many Australian homeowners agree: in April 2013, more than a million households across the country had solar panels while nearly 800,000 are using solar to warm their homes and water (solar hot water systems and air source heat pump systems)
Additional benefits
Installing a solar power system at home can reduce your carbon footprint. Unlike traditional sources of electricity from the grid, solar energy is green, clean and renewable. In use solar panels release no greenhouse gases and they don’t pollute the air. And even the amount of electricity used in the manufacturing process is minimal compared to the electricity saved by using them