Solar panels make great sense for homeowners, and they do more than provide electricity to meet your household’s needs. Depending on the size of your array, solar panels could be feeding back into the grid for other homes to use.
How do panels give feedback to the grid? How do they convert that into usable power?
Solar Panels feedback into the grid. Photovoltaic (PV) solar cells capture sunlight and turn it directly into electricity, converting light energy into electrical energy. This design means that the system is an off-grid power supply that generates at its output capacity.
Solar panels feedback into the grid, just like all the other power sources. The difference is that solar panels are not directly burning something to make heat, making them more efficient.
The main difference between solar panels and other power sources is that solar panels produce electricity while other power sources produce heat. Instead of using a chemical reaction to create heat to run an engine, solar panels convert light directly into electrical energy.
The mechanism of solar feed-in is the same as that of wind turbines. The difference, however, is that while turbines are connected to the power grid by a network of transmission lines, solar panels are connected directly to the mains.
The presence of an increasing number of PV panels on the market is felt by everyone who pays his electricity bill. A utility company has to compensate for the excess, so their income decreases. All electricity produced by solar panels must be fed into the grid and consumed by someone else.
Solar energy producers receive a “feed-in fee” – a certain amount per kWh they give feedback in. The return on investment varies from country to country and depends on the investment costs and other factors. To ensure their income doesn’t decrease too much, utilities have put up resistance and created obstacles for people installing solar panels.
It’s important to note that these two mechanisms – feed-in and feedback – work as a pump: they push more and more renewable energy into the grid.
Solar panels do not work like regular power sources. They are connected to the grid, just like your TV set is connected to the grid. When people disconnect their solar panels, they are not removing their contribution to the grid. What they are doing is just simply switching off one of the appliances that they have connected.
We can see that by harnessing solar power and feeding it back into the grid, we can ultimately help save our environment. While it isn’t a viable energy source for everyone yet, as the cost of solar panels decreases and government incentives increase, we’ll see more people embracing this renewable power source to reduce their carbon emissions.
