Solar Education Center

Solar renewables are fascinating. The sun bestows upon the earth incomprehensible amounts of energy every day. If you count only the energy received by earth’s land masses, the amount of received energy is 5000 TIMES the amount of energy used WORLDWIDE.

Photovoltaics as we know them (solar collectors that convert light into electricity) were developed by Bell Laboratories in Basking Ridge NJ. The whole process of conversion of light to electricity is based on the photoelectric phenomenon, a topic which Einstein wrote about in 1905.

The resources on the rest of this page are aimed at educating you about certain important aspects of solar.



Solar Finance 101

Solar Finance 102

What Are SRECs?

Utility Outages

Optimal Orientation

Properties with good solar potential have the following things in common:

  1. They have plenty of roof or ground space that can be used for array(s)
  2. There is very little shade (few trees or neighboring buildings)

Ideally, the space available for arrays is South facing, however that is not a requirement. Roof surfaces with orientations of 45 degrees off south still receive more than 92% of what an optimally oriented roof would receive and roof surfaces with East-West orientations receive more than 74% of what an optimally oriented roof would receive. Tree shade is often more detrimental to a candidate site’s efficiency than orientation.

Have a look at the following to get a better feel for how orientation affects efficiency: