Author: McKinley Corbley / Source: Good News Network
A 13-year-old scientist has just won a top science prize by creating a program that allows solar panels to generate more electricity by following the location of the sun from dawn until dusk.
Georgia Hutchinson’s experiment is built on a simple premise: if a solar panel is able to follow the sun at all times, then they can generate more electricity.
The more electricity they generate, the faster they can 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).
RELATED: Girl Scout Wrote Letters to Companies, Urging Them to Ditch Plastic – And They Did
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…
The post Solar Panels Recoup Cost Faster by Following Sun From Dawn Till Dusk, Thanks to Clever Teen Scientist appeared first on FeedBox.