PHOTOVOLTAIC SOLAR ENERGY: GENERATIONS, TECHNOLOGY, APPLICATIONS AND SCOPE IN INDIA

It is hard to be believe a single moment in our life with electrical energy. This electrical energy can be generated from coal, burning fossil fuels, petroleum, natural gases etc. This energy sources are known as non-renewable sources as they are available in fixed quantity in nature. They are also responsible for environmental pollution and global warning. Therefore, it is always possible to provide alternative sources of this kind of energy. Some of these sources are tidal energy, wind energy, hydrothermal energy, bio-energy and solar energy. But out of all of these sources, solar energy is particularly very interesting because sun is always there to exist in future also. The other advantage of solar energy is that it is a clean and green source of energy. It does not leave any carbon residues and freely available to common people so, no issue of pollution and global warming. The device which is used to convert solar energy into electrical energy is known as photovoltaic (PV) cell. These PV cells can be fabricated using different technology so it is important to learn and understand the working principle, how to fabricate and test the solar cell by different technology developed from time to time. In this paper, various PV cell technologies are discussed and comparison is done between them. India which is 5th largest economy of the world, have lots of scopes for solar energy and recently it replaced Italy to become 3rd most producer of solar energy in the world. Therefore, in the second half of paper, challenges, scopes, initiatives and schemes are discussed in respect of India.