In recent years, renewable energy is widely advocated by
many countries. Photovoltaic cell is one of the most popular renewable energy products.
It is a technology which generates electricity from
sunlight and it works only with certain spectrum of the white light component
of the sun. In Malaysia, the abundance of sunlight makes solar photovoltaic a
very viable form for generating electricity. Since the sun is the fuel source
of photovoltaic electricity, this form of electricity generation is said to be
renewable. Solar photovoltaic (PV) is
not only renewable; since there is no CO2 emission in the process of
electricity generation, solar photovoltaic is also considered a clean form of
electricity generation or can be described as friendly environment.
However, during
the operation of the PV cell, only around 15% of solar radiation is converted
to electricity with the rest converted to heat. The electrical efficiency will
decrease when the operating temperature of the PV module increases.
That is because the optimum temperature of photovoltaic is 25oC
but in Malaysia, the ambient temperature is 34oC.So, to overcome this problem,
the thermoelectric is being used because it can moved the heat from one side to
the other side. From this heat, it can convert into electricity because thermoelectric
is a device that creates voltage when there is a different temperature on each
side. By this, the efficiency will increased.
However,
it is unrealistic to expect the efficiency of both continuously. There must be some
time the efficiency will drop. So, to overcome this, an active cooling have
been used. Fan has been found to be the best methods to cooling the
thermoelectric that can lower the temperature of thermoelectric and by this, it
will raise the temperature differences between photovoltaic and thermoelectric.
The
highest temperature differences between the photovoltaic and thermoelectric, the
higher the efficiency and the performance of PV-TE
will be improved.
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