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Solar energy will play a major role in a fast approaching future. The amount that hits the Earth's surface in one hour equals the energy humans consume in a year.
Moreover, although this energy is not evenly distributed (the tropics receive
much more radiation than the poles), most of the earth’s population lives in
regions where solar radiation contains enough energy for most of the needs. But
there’s a need to develop increasingly efficient devices in order to capture
and make available this energy.
In
this regard solar thermal energy plays an important role. This encompasses all
applications that make use of the infrared radiation, transforming it into heat
that is directly applied in our needs or transformed by way of turbines into
electricity for storage and distribution.
Thermal applications are the ones
that achieve a higher degree of efficiency extracting from the inflow of
radiation an amount higher by 2 to 3 times than the other solar technology:
photovoltaic cells.
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