Jun 29 2010
The University of Sheffield has commenced the installation of a solar farm on the roof of a building in the campus, as part of the £120,000 investment that will aid in improving photovoltaic research. Funding for the Sheffield Solar Farm is done by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).
The solar farm will involve the 70m² photovoltaic panels installation, which is to be done on the roof of Hicks building in the university. The solar panel will aid both researchers and the university who can test their experimental photovoltaic cells. The farm would also supply electricity to the building, which would decrease carbon emissions in the university.
In order to check the efficiency of the photovoltaic technology, a live web-cam and web-feed would be used to collect the data and display it on the solar farm website. The device would track the amount of heat radiated by the sun on the roof, impact of weather on the amount of energy produced and the power generated by each panel. The Physics and Astronomy Department in the University has begun developing plastic solar cells instead of silicon that would decrease cost and ensure wider usage of photovoltaic technology.
Professor from the Department of Physics, Dr. Alastair Buckley, stated that the Sheffield solar farm would decrease the gap in usage of solar cells in research and in real world. He further commented that the performance of the photovoltaic technology would be compared with other available technologies, which would order the research of cell designs with real world requirements.
Source: http://www.shef.ac.uk/