Solar, Solar PV, Solar Panels, what is the difference?

There are so many terms when talking about solar, so here’s our jargon breakdown!

Solar: Officially means ”of or relating to the Sun”. Within the solar installation industry it is used as a ‘catch all’ term when talking about the product or system that produces electricity for you from the sun.

Solar PV: PV stands for ‘photovoltaics’. PV is a technology that uses semiconductors to capture and convert the energy in sunlight into electricity. Solar PV has a wide range of uses most commonly to generate electricity for use in houses and industry or to generate electricity for the grid. Other uses include powering stand-alone ‘off-grid’ systems, powering electrical systems on boats and solar street lighting. New technologies will some day see solar PV used in the windows of buildings and for powering electric cars.

Solar Panels: A solar panel is made up of many solar cells. Solar cells are made of silicon, like semiconductors. They are constructed with a positive layer and a negative layer, which together create an electric field, generating electricity. You will see around 60 of these cells on each solar panel. Most solar panels are rectangle in shape.

Solar Array: Simply put, a solar array is a collection of multiple solar panels that generate electricity as a system. When we talk about solar arrays, we are typically describing the solar panels themselves and how they are situated.

Solar Power: Solar power describes the process of converting energy from sunlight into electricity.

Solar Energy: Solar energy is radiant light and heat from the Sun. Solar panels convert this energy to electricity.

So how did we end up discovering how to utilise the suns energy?

The photoelectric effect was first noted by a French physicist, Edmund Bequerel, in 1839, who found that certain materials would produce small amounts of electric current when exposed to light.

In 1905, Albert Einstein described the nature of light and the photoelectric effect on which photovoltaic technology is based, for which he later won a Nobel prize in physics.

The first photovoltaic module was built by Bell Laboratories in 1954. It was billed as a solar battery and was mostly just an experiment as it was too expensive to gain widespread use.

In the 1960s, the space industry began to make the first serious use of the technology to provide power aboard spacecraft. Through the space programs, the technology advanced, its reliability was established, and the cost began to decline.

During the energy crisis in the 1970s, photovoltaic technology gained recognition as a reliable source of power for non-space applications.

So there you have it, the mystery of the history and the terminologies explained. We hope that has ironed out a few questions you may have had about solar.

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