Photovoltaic power generation

D. L. Pulfrey, Photovoltaic Power Generation, Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., New York, 1978. 

About 10 MW of utility grid-connected photovoltaic power generation is installed and effectively operating today. 

Photovoltaic Power Systems Executive Committee of the International Energy Agency, Energy from the Desert Feasibility of Very Large Scale Photovoltaic Power Generation Systems, Ed. by K. Kurokawa, James and James, London 2003 also see http //www.iea-pvps.org/products/rep8 01s.htm. 

The basic energy producing unit of a photovoltaic power generating system is the photovoltaic or solar cell. Solar cells can be made from a variety of different materials, however the silicon solar cell is the most common, well developed, and readily available, so it is what we will discuss here. 

Solar cells—Congresses. 2. Photovoltaic power generation—Congresses. I. Cardon, Felix. II. Gomes, Walter. III. Dekeyser, W. (Willy) IV. North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Division of Scientific Affairs. V. Title. VI. Series. 

J. Haynos, J. Allison, R. Amdt, A. Meulenberg, The comsat non-reflective silicon solar cell a second generation improved cell, in International Conference on Photovoltaic Power Generation, Hamburg (1974), p. 146... 

A photovoltaic material generates a voltage when it is exposed to light and photovoltaic can be considered as a specialized area of optoelectronics. The principle has been known for many decades but it became a industrial reality only in 1958 when an array of photovoltaic cells, based on single-crystal silicon, provided power for a space vehicle. 

Wind, solar thermal, and photovoltaic power together accounted in 1998 for only about 1% of U.S. electricity generation from renewable sources and only about 0.1% ofall electricity (DOE/EIA 1999a). 

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