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Ok, you’ve bought a 50W solar panel that you’re told will produce about 3A per hour of energy, but is it fair to expect to achieve that level of energy production all of the time? Unfortunately, the answer is no! and strangely enough for once, you can primarily blame the weather.
Those power production ratings on the panel will assume ideal weather conditions and the perfect setup i.e. a sparkling clean solar panel mounted exactly in line with a noonday sun on a cloudless day when it’s not too hot and nothing’s shading even the tiniest part of the panel… Now let’s have a quick look at what you can really expect under different weather conditions.
The good news is that as long as there’s daylight (UV light) falling on the panel, it will be producing some energy for you; it doesn’t have to be sunny for the panel to work, but broadly speaking, the best weather for solar power is a bright sunny, but cool day. And at the other extreme, in fog or under heavy overcast skies, you can expect your panel to produce as little as 25% - 30% of this, effectively making your 50W panel a 12.5W panel for that day.
This levels of power being produced by any renewable system is going to fluctuate wildly depending on the weather conditions, sometimes even producing significantly more power that the rated value of the panel*
This is of course “not an exact science” but please have a look at the chart and images below for some more idea of what to expect.
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