Whenever you want to calculate the amount of electricity a solar system is going to produce, you need to do a tiny bit of homework. There are several variables that need to be determined for anybody no matter how smart they are to tell you how much solar you will need to reach the desired amount of kilo watt hours or kwh.
The variables that are needed to determine the amount of solar panels are the following:
- amount of average sunlight hours per day
- percentage of shading that the area which will have the solar panels has
- the angle that the solar panels will be facing or tilted
- and to a lesser degree some information about the inverter and the energy efficiency loss it is rated for
Once you know that bit of information it will be pretty simple to calculate the amount of solar panels that will be needed as it then just turns into a simple algebra equation that can be figured out quite easily.
If anybody has further questions with regards to calculating how much solar power you need for your home’s situation, feel free to email me (adam@longtermsolar.com), and I will try to respond to you in as quickly as possible with some relevant data and solar information.
To provide an actual real life example to the 30 kwh per day of electricity production from solar, lets assume the location gets 5 hours of sunlight per day, with no shading, and a perfectly optimized angle of the panels towards the sun. And lets also assume there is a 15% energy loss with the inverter converting the power from DC to AC.
This would mean that 30kwh/day needs to be produced over a 5 hour period each day on average. That would mean that 6kwh would need to be produced in AC each hour. If we backed in the 15 energy loss, that would mean that about 7kwh in DC would need to be produced from the panels per hour. Which would mean a 7kw solar system would do the job, and that would equate to approximately 35 solar panels to produce the eventual 30kwh in Alternating Current.
