Thanks to this teen scientist, solar panels to generate more electricity by following sun from dawn until dusk
Georgia Hutchinson is a 13-year-old scientist who has come up with a program that allows solar panels to follow the movement of the sun from dawn till dusk, thereby generating more electricity and enabling a faster pay off their purchase costs and utility bills.
Most solar panels are only set up to point in one direction – and while there are solar panels that are equipped with trackers that allow them to follow the sun by moving along two axises, they are incredibly expensive.
So as a means of maximizing a panel’s exposure of the sun, Georgia borrowed an equation that was developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The equation uses a person’s location to state exactly where the sun will be in the sky at any given time. She then used the equation to program a solar tracker so that the panel could point directly towards the sun at all times. After that, she ran some experiments to compare exactly how much electricity her data-driven solar panel could generate in comparison to a fixed-point panel – and her results were impressive.
Read more here: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/teens-solar-panels-follow-sun-from-dawn-till-dusk/