A Simple Method to Increase the Amount of Energy Produced by the Photovoltaic Panels

The photovoltaic energy can become competitive by the conjugate effort of the researchers and manufacturers. Increasing the amount of electricity supplied by photovoltaic panels is a challenge. The paper briefly presents some methods which can lead to achieving this goal. A simple method to increase the quantity of the electrical energy delivered by the photovoltaic panels is also presented in this paper alongside the experimental setup and the software created in LabVIEW for monitoring the output of the panels. 1. Introduction The importance of renewable energy as a major source of energy for the entire world gradually grew, alongside the conventional energy sources. Due to the development of some countries with large populations such as China, India, and Brazil the energy requirements grew exponentially. The solutions for these requirements can be found in the exploitations of fossil fuels, leading to pollution increase and amplification of greenhouse effect and, as an alternative, there is the use of renewable energy and increasing its efficiency. The development of the renewable energy domain of the last years can also be explained by the aid and involvement of the politics. Countries such as USA, Canada, China, India, and European Union had created the legal frame for support using the subsidies, feed-in-tariff, fiscal instruments, creating the trading of green certificates, and so forth [1, 2]. Most of the countries have a declared goal for the renewable energy. California, state of USA, has an ambitious target—33% of the electricity must be produced from the renewable energy until 2020 [2, 3]. The fixed target is that until 2020 in the European Union 20% of the total energy must be obtained from renewable energy [4]. The members of the European Union have different targets; for example, Romania must obtain 24% of the total energy from renewable sources [2, 4]. Also, Japan has a high target for renewable energy production; this is 25%–35% from the total energy. China has 15% until 2020 and Australia has at least 20% of the electricity [2, 5, 6]. The photovoltaic energy becomes one of the most important types of renewable energy because the sun energy is free, there is an updated technology of using the silicon in electronics and this is easily transferrable to the manufacturing of solar cells, new types of solar cells and materials are being developed due to competiveness and the competition between researchers, and last, but not least, because of the political and economical factors, by the environmental rules imposed and by investment. Thus a