Historically the use of solar cells has been limited due to expensive manufacturing costs and relatively low solar cell efficiency. Recently, advances in research and scale of production have both reduced costs and increased efficiency, allowing for many varied and innovative uses of solar cells.
Society today relies on sources of external energy for the manufacture of goods and the delivery of services. This energy allows us to live in diverse climate settings, in large populations, and often in controlled environments. The level of dependence on those sources varies according to the location, climate, level of comfort, and needs of a community.
Energy is expensive to acquire yet easy to waste, and using it for electricity and fuel takes its toll on the planet. To date, the greatest sources of energy have been fossil fuels, of which the three most commonly used are: coal, petroleum and natural gas. Unfortunately, the combustion of fossil fuels releases pollution into the atmosphere and because fossil fuels are non-renewable their availability will decline.
Conversely, comfort can also be achieved with lower energy consumption through the use of energy efficient approaches. Well planned energy use balances human comfort with reasonable energy consumption levels by developing and implementing effective ways to create and utilize energy.
Smart Solar’s solution to this is creating innovative products which are solar powered; utilizing solar energy to power products in a number of ways. In our solar water features and solar aquatic products the solar power runs the pumps, but in our solar lighting products the electricity is stored in rechargeable batteries, allowing the product to use batteries to illuminate every night when the sun is not present.
