empire of the sun
There’s no better place for
watching sunlight turn
into electricity than
a garden—plants,
after all, are just
living solar panels,
capturing light
and turning it into
the energy that
fuels life itself.
So there’s a kind
of synchronicity
in turning to the
sun when you need
power in the garden.
At its simplest, using
solar energy is as easy as
popping a cloche over a row of
winter lettuces to trap and intensify sunshine on frosty days, heating up the
ground enough to keep everything growing strongly. But photovoltaic technology is becoming so sophisticated and versatile that nowadays we can harness the sun’s help for dozens of garden applications, from raising seedlings
to lighting a path to powering the drill you use to build raised beds.
At the moment, the default setting for powering everything from heated
propagators to the radio you listen to while you’re working in the greenhouse is conventional electricity or batteries—plug it in, flick a switch and
you’re cooking. But that’s like getting out the Chevy to drive
the two-minute walk to the
store. There’s a mismatch
between what you need to
do, and what you’re doing it
with. In a garden, where you
use a relatively small amount
of electricity at intermittent
intervals, you have all the
energy you require already
installed, and it’s shining out
of the sky onto your head.
photovoltaic
solar panels operate on light,
not sunshine, and light still
reaches the ground even when
it’s cloudy, though usually at
lower concentrations.”
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Maximum Yield USA | January 2015