Technical Innovations for YemenSolar Energy [Archives:1999/05/Science & Technology]

Solar energy is the mother of all energy. It is the main source of energy on earth. All other well-known types of energy like oil, gas, coal, wind, waterfalls etc. are derived from solar energy.
Any small tree on your road is a great factory utilizing free solar energy. In the presence of chlorophyll (the green pigment is leaves) water combines with carbon dioxide in green plants to produce carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are the sugars and starches that human beings and animals live on. The efficiency of this conversion is only about 1%. If this efficiency is increased to 10%, through new technical innovations, the world could extract all of the energy that it needs from the sun. The Arab world will be among the countries to benefit most from solar energy.

Solar energy has been subjected to intensive research and interesting applications have been found in the nineteenth, and during the first half of the twentieth century. Actually, one of the main disadvantages of the discovery and use of oil is that other sources of energy were ignored due to the excellent properties of oil, its cheapness, ease of storage, handling, and transport, and its wide applications and unlimited advantages. Recently, when the dark faces of oil were discovered; the drastic pollution of the earth for example, its high price, and the desire to spare it for the production of petrochemicals and other more important applications, solar energy is the primary choice as a free, renewable, and non-polluting energy.

Intensive scientific technical research is being carried out in the world today to tap the benefits of solar energy. Unfortunately, the Arab countries haven’t done much scientific research into solar energy and its applications. In fact, Israel is doing much more solar energy research than all the Arab states together.
The main objective of solar energy research is to convert solar radiation into thermal or electrical energy through a series of operations by utilizing an appropriate energy converting instrument.

Solar energy is used intensively in many parts of the world. Even cold countries that do not have enough sunshine have already started exploring the potential of solar energy. Countries are driven to exploit solar energy due to its being renewable, environmentally friendly and readily available. There are factories in Germany that are using solar energy to get all their needs for electric current and heat. Germany is a cold country, especially in the winter. It has less that half as much sunshine as Yemen. However, Germans are doing intensive research into solar applications and exploiting it for their local needs. Israel has developed many techniques to convert solar energy into electrical and thermal energy and applied their findings for industrial use. This work has been developed in cooperation with International Research groups and has been sold to American and other factories.
Future Industries Consultants,
Sanaa.

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