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The world has been awakening to the effects of global warming. Extreme weather conditions, some, not naturally witnessed in parts of the globe have shown occurrences. More than common, occurrences of droughts, wild fires, hurricanes and extreme flooding have forced the world to acknowledge the slow and steady ascent of global warming and justify the apprehensions of the scientific community.

Governments, all over, have starting devising strategies to counter the effects. Lot of them revolve around regulating the use of conventional sources of energy and systematically replacing them by their non-conventional counter parts. This has required lot of investment in research to find plausible ways to channelise energy from the useable non-conventional sources and converting them into electricity etc.

The various sources that have shown promise are Solar, Wind, and Hydel Power. Research in these fields have allowed steady progress in increasing the efficiencies of the existing systems and thereby generate more energy from the available sources.

If we compare the three sources, then solar seems to be the greener option. Solar has significant impact over the other sources on various fronts like CO2 emissions, water use and social disturbance.

Ease of Access:

Sunlight is available round the year and with reasonable uniformity. There are areas which receive lesser intensity of the sunlight compared to others, but overall it is available in reasonable quantity to facilitate power generation. This is quite unlike wind or hydel power technologies which require unique parameters to aide facilitation of power generation.

Ease of Adoption:

When we talk of conventional power sources, we think of large power houses spanning over acres of land. This is not unlike wind or hydel power, which are spread over large spans of land in concentrated capacities. Solar technology is quite flexible on this front. Alongside large solar parks which span over large land area, solar plant can also be easily set up for a unit house to fulfill its individual power requirement. Solar pump system is a classical example of such application based usage where a solar plant is setup to fulfill the pump units power requirements.

Less Investment allowing Faster Returns:

Also considering solar’s ability to be integrated at a basic unit level, the investment associated with solar plants is much lower compared to that in wind or hydel power units thereby allowing a faster return on the investment.

Lesser Cost of Ownership:

Solar Power plants donot have any prime moving units. Most of the equipments are stationary and can be housed inside standardized chambers thereby allowing lesser cost of maintainance due to breakdown or failure. Also the solar panels that make chunk of the power plant only require cleaning for preventive maintainance. This significantly brings down the running cost thereby affecting the cost of ownership.

Ease Of Integration:

Solar power plants can be easily integrated with the existing power lines allowing optimization of power usage from the main grid.