Saturday, January 22, 2011

Cloudy Winter Days and Solar Panels

I am often curious as to how the season and the weather impact the efficiency of panels as it can really have a negative impact depending on the scenario.

At the moment, I can only give a perspective of the winter. I would say that in January, on a sunny day, I could get around 15kWh. From what I have found, is that if you only add clouds (Where most of the day is grey out but the sun peaks through here and there), it cuts the efficiency in half, to somewhere around maybe 8kWh/day.

From what I can see, if you add clouds and snow into the equation, the output is cut by half again, and giving you maybe 3kWh.

So you can quickly see that for strong performance, the sun needs to be out and anything that gets in the way of the sun rays will have a pretty significant impact.

I should also quickly mention that snow on the panels has an enormous impact on the system and that just because it is cold out, does NOT mean that the panels produce less, in fact, panels produce energy more efficiently if they are cooler!

I plan on posting many more posts on performance, whether, snow, and clouds in the future!

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