Solar Performance - May 2016

This May was a great example of one of the drawback of solar power: weather dependency. Thanks to three really bad days mid-month (worse than day in December in January!) followed by a couple weeks of lower than average sun my system missed its production estimates by 60 kWh (12.7%).

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Energy Use in 2014

Recently I was thinking that it would be interesting to take a look at the amount of energy I use (and generate) to see how it varies over time. I already had daily data for my electrical and gas use, but thought that it would be interesting to see if this correlated to the weather. Luckily I found a weather station near my house that had a treasure trove of data, including solar radiation numbers. It took me awhile to pull all the data together, but I was able to come up with an interesting set of charts. I'm also trying something new in this post by embedding the charts directly, which should make them interactive. Let me know how it works for you!

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Solar Nemesis: Rain

Over the course of the day my poor solar panels weren't even able to produce half a kilowatt-hour of energy; their total for the day was just 494 Wh. In comparison, on a sunny summer's day the same system was able to produce that much power in just 11 minutes during the peak period.

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