What are solar panels?
Placed on roofs or on the ground, solar panels capture the sunlight and convert it into electricity.
And you don’t need to live somewhere warm and sunny, because solar needs only light not heat.
It’s true that the more light the panels receive, the more electricity they can generate. But they still work on cloudy days – just as a solar-powered calculator does.
Their full name is solar photovoltaic panels, or PV. (“Photo” means “light” and “volts” means electricity.) At Solar century, we usually just say “solar” for short.

How do solar panels work?
You’ve probably seen solar panels on roofs, or maybe on the ground. The panels are frames made up of solar PV cells (these are layers of monocrystalline or polycrystalline silicon – a handy fact for your next quiz):
1.    The sun’s radiation hits these cells and is converted to direct current (DC) energy.
2.    This DC energy travels to an electrical device called an inverter, which converts DC energy into alternating current (AC) energy.
3.    The AC electricity produced is just like the power supplied by your utility company, and can go directly to power things like computers and lights.
4.    Or the power produced can be exported back to the mains national electricity grid and get redistributed around the country.