So leave the snow and wait for it to slide off, which usually happens the next time its sunny and warms up a little bit. I would need a high ladder to do that, and bringing an extension pole up to my roof in the middle of a Buffalo winter just isn’t worth a possible trip to the hospital. It doesn’t matter if it’s sunny - when my panels are covered in an inch or two of snow, production stops completely. You can see that the day’s production wasn’t measured in kilowatt-hours but 441 watt-hours - less than a single kWh! The graph is basically flat all day. ![]() It snows a lot, and snow can cover my entire system for a week or more.Ī light dusting of snow will get blown away, but after about an inch of snow accumulates on the panels, electricity production is stopped completely. How much electricity do solar panels generate in winter? But if you live somewhere like the southwest where it rains less frequently, you might find that spring months are when you have the best overall production. I still generate more electricity in the summer months, but that’s because here in the spring, we still get a lot of rainy and cloudy days. (See that smooth production curve?) My 18 panel system generated a total of over 33 kilowatt-hours. The high temperature in Buffalo that day, according to Weather Underground, was a cool 56☏ and it was clear all day. ![]() So far this year, the day on which I had the highest production was a perfectly clear day in May: It is called the power temperature coefficient, and it will be listed as a percentage of power output loss per degree Celsius (%/☌).įor example, if your solar panel lists a power temperature coefficient of -0.30%, this means that it produces 0.30% less power for every one Celsius degree increase in temperature. This is a well-known phenomenon, and you will see it listed in the specifications on your solar panel datasheet. This is because that solar panels produce less electricity when it’s hot. It turns out that you might get your best solar energy output in the spring, and not the summer as you might think. What’s the best time of year for solar energy production? Depending on your climate, you might even do really well. So summer is the best overall for me, but you might be surprised that there are days even in the middle of winter when you can generate a lot of electricity. ![]() March is a lot better at 430 kWh, but still only 60% of July’s average. December produces only 122 kWh, which is just 17% as much as July. But first, here’s a table that shows my average total production in three different months over 5 years:Īs you can see, the summer is when my system generates the most electricity, with an average total generation of 717 kilowatt-hours in the month of July. To illustrate what this looks like from summer to winter, I’ll share some graphs from my system below. While there is definitely less production in the winter months, I still come out on top financially with home solar. And yet, I have a solar panel system that still provides some electricity in the dark winter months. Some years, it seems like winter lasts for nine months.
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