Solar Panel Power Output

Solar Panel power output

Solar Panels – Power your Home for Free

Solar Power is generated when energy is extracted from the suns rays through the use of Photovoltaic cells (commonly referred to as solar cells). These cells convert photos (from the suns rays) into electricity, and this process is known as the “photovoltaic effect.”

Many people are beginning to invest in such technologies to avoid rising electricity prices and to help our environment. If every home could be fitted with solar panels, then the strain on power stations would decrease dramatically, which means we wouldn’t be left as dependable on fossil fuels as we currently are.

There are many alternatives to solar power, so why should we invest our money into solar technologies, rather than lets say, home Wind Turbines, or a geothermal energy system? To answer this, we shall look at the advantages and disadvantages of the technologies above.

Solar Panels:

Advantages – widely available, relatively easy to install, very significant output, a solar panel will pay for itself in two to three years, lifetime of 20 to 30 years, modern cells can harness power on cloudy days, can bring power to remote locations.

Disadvantages – costly to begin with, older technologies won’t work too well if cloudy.

Wind Turbines:

Advantages – fairly cheap for a home Turbine, can be used in harsh conditions.

Disadvantages – totally dependent on the wind, small output, larger turbines can be noisy, Wind Farms are seen by many as eyesores, larger (more effective) turbines can be very expensive.

Geothermal Energy:

Advantages – can aid in the heating of hot water, save money on running your boiler, can supply effective underfloor heating, heat from the ground can be relied upon.

Disadvantages – have to lay hundreds of meters of piping underground, hard to fix a leak, expensive, longer time to heat water than a boiler.

So there we have the advantages and disadvantages of each. Assuming you do not live by a rapid stream or running river (which rules out hydroelectric power), then as you can see from the above text, Solar Power Is your best option. Solar panels offer many more friendly factors and less disadvantages than other technologies.

A proven method is to have more than one of the above technologies installed around a home (all three would be a dream, but also leave a large hole in your wallet). So if you have the spare cash, are interrested in saving money on future electricity bills, care for the environment, and would like to be less dependent on fossil fuels, why not take a deeper look into the world of Renewable Energy Resources.

http://www.clean-energy-ideas.com/solar_panels.html

About the Author

Trying to understand electricity in a solar application?

Ok, I’m trying to set up a Solar Lighting system, so i need to understand what I need in terms of power. That is, how much solar panel output I need to charge a battery in the course of a day of a given capacity to burn a given number of high-output LEDs at night. problem for me is the lights & the panels are rated in watts and the batteries in amp-hours. Lets just say I want to burn 50 LEDs at 1.6 watts (140mA) and 6 volts apiece for 10 hours, what capacity battery (in amp-hrs) would that need, and what solar panel output (in watts at 12v) would it take to charge that battery to full in a 10 hour day?

A 12 volt battery produces 12 Watt hours per Ampere hour.
So a 100 ampere hour 12 volt battery stores 1200 watt hours.

As the battery approaches end of its life, or if the water level is low, the battery will store less than rated amp-hours.

Most LED will operate 3 in series on a 12 volt battery to get maximum use. But if your units require 6 volts you would put them 2 in series on 12 volt battery, and still get 0.14 amps of 12 volt power.
25 such groupings will draw 25 * 0.14 amps close to 4 amps, which will run 25 hours on a 100 amp hour battery.

You will likely want to run other things too, so I suggest you go for a 100 amp hour battery.

Now to fully charge that, if a solar panel is putting out 2 watt hours a day for each watt of rated capacity, you need to provide 600 watts of rated capacity. (100 amps hours times 12 volts is 1200 watts. But the original task was to provide only about 500 watt hours, so you could get along with about 250 watts of solar panels.

Those numbers are pessimistic, based on never switching off any lights, leaving them all on all the time. But it is also based on my yield in winter, which may be different from yours.
You would confirm what your local winter output would be per watt of rated capacity. (likely between 1.5 and 5 watt-hours per watt of rated capacity.
One would provide excess capacity in the battery to allow you to store extra power if it happens. Excess capacity in panels is expensive.

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