Course: REEC 120 Sustainability and Renewable Energy

Unit 6 Overview

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In Unit 6 we are going to explore materials from the book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air by David Mackay. You are expected to read two sections:

- “Solar” pages 38-49
- “Solar II” pages 283-288

The rest of this unit has been adapted from a presentation by Timothy Wilhelm, from Kankakee Community College.

One of the more popular ways to produce electrical energy using a renewable source is with solar. Generally we assign 1000 Watts per meter square as the amount of solar energy that strikes the Earth under some ideal conditions.
This raw energy provides four main things:

1. solar thermal, a direct heating method of buildings
2. solar photovoltaic, converting sun to electrical
3. solar biomass, using sun to grow wood, algae or items like corn soybeans
4. food

When folks talk about implementing solar the first situation to try and achieve is solar thermal heating because it is most cost effective, and then and only then implement solar PV.