Energy powers our homes, businesses, and industries - and is fundamental to our society. The process however, of generating electricity is the country's largest industrial source of air pollution.

This means that the energy decisions we make every day can encourage the development of new power sources, save natural resources, and help preserve the quality of our environment.

Solar cells cleanly convert sunlight into electrical energy. The cells consist mainly of silicon, with some added variants - typically boron and phosphorous. An imbalance, or displacement, of electrons held in the in the silicon cell creates an internal electrostatic field. Sunlight provides a stream of energy particles called photons. These photons streaming from the sun penetrate into the silicon cell and strike silicon atoms. This ionizes the atoms causing the outer electron to break free - the free movement of electrons is electric current.

When the current flows to the power-consuming item - such as a battery - the electrons are de-energised and flow back to the original cells ready to repeat the process. The process enables the cell to continue to produce power as long as the sun shines on it. This process of converting light (photons) to electricity (Voltage) is called the photovoltaic (PV) effect.

Each solar cell is capable of producing approximately 0.5 Volts from this process. To increase the Voltage, cells are connected together with 36 cells needed for 12-Volt applications. The amount of current these solar cells will produce is governed by the size of the individual cells. Hence a 2 Watt 12 volt module has 36 small cells and a 120 Watt 12 Volt module has 36 much larger cells.

The cells are sealed in a glass substrate and aluminium frame called a solar module. Our solar cells are laminated between high transmissivity, low-iron 3mm tempered glass and a sheet of Tedlar-Polyester-Tedlar (TPT) material, by two sheets of Ethlene Vinyl Acetate (EVA) to prevent moisture penetrating into the module.

The output of the module is influenced by the amount of sunlight shining on it. On cloudy days it may be only 10% of that on a bright sunny day. Modules are manufactured according to cell size with a 80 watt module having twice the surface-cell area of a 40 watt module.