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Introduction

Huge amounts of fuel are being burnt to meet the world’s never-ending and growing energy demands. This is damaging to the environment and unsustainable as fuel supply is going to run out someday. In contrast, solar energy is an inexhaustible resource and a clean one. Solar energy is the light and radiant heat. The sun produces vast amounts of renewable solar energy that can be collected and converted to heat and electricity. In theory, three weeks of sunshine offsets all known fuel reserves (Martin Green, 2000). If we were able to tap into a tiny fraction of that energy supply, we would well be on our way to solve the energy crisis. The best way of doing that now is by converting it straight to electricity using solar cells or photovoltaic cells as they are now known as. Photovoltaic (PV) systems convert sunlight directly into electricity and are potentially one of the most useful renewable technologies. Although it is not yet fully mature but it is developing and gaining interest from various parties.

A PV system is a modular system because it is built out of several pieces or elements, which have to be scaled up to build larger systems or scaled down to build smaller systems. This is an advantage as this system can be scaled from the milliwatt range to the megawatt range to produce electricity for very different uses and applications: from a wristwatch to a communication satellite or a grid connected PV terrestrial plant. Although the operational principles remain the same, the conversion problems have specific constraints. Other than that, PV systems has few or no moving parts, noise and pollution free, low operating cost, reliable, and has an abundant resource where 700 GW can be produced from 30, 000 km2 of panels (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Colorado, USA).

On a planet where more than 2 billion people do not have access to electricity, photovoltaic systems can provide this necessity to...