U.S. Department of Energy - Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

Solar Energy Technologies Program

Animations

Check out a one-minute animated video that shows how a solar cell converts sunlight into electricity.

(Note: early in the video, you'll hear the statement, "Every minute, enough of this [sunlight] energy reaches the Earth to meet the world's energy demand for a whole year." This statement is misleading if specific assumptions are not considered. A more accurate general statement is that "every hour enough of this energy...".)

We have provided the animation in Quicktime and MPEG multimedia formats.

QuickTime format:

(free QuickTime plug-in)

• small video, 180x135 (QuickTime 7.9 MB)
• large video, 240x180 (QuickTime 11.4 MB)

MPEG format:

• small video (MPEG 14.8 MB)
• large video (MPEG 26.5 MB)

Text version (TXT 1 KB)