Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Power to the people
I filed the solar energy production figure for December today. Not a bad month, all things considered: 177 kilowatt-hours, which is about what we did last December. (By comparison, the average TVA nuclear power plant generates around 766 megawatt-hours per month, so we’ve got a ways to go.)
Despite the high techiness of photovoltaics, the all things that need to be considered are actually rather agricultural in nature: hours of sunlight, snowfall, cloud cover. Take a look at our production against monthly possible hours of daylight (time of sunset minus time of sunrise)
Despite the high techiness of photovoltaics, the all things that need to be considered are actually rather agricultural in nature: hours of sunlight, snowfall, cloud cover. Take a look at our production against monthly possible hours of daylight (time of sunset minus time of sunrise)
The steady rise and fall of the daylight line is the systematic, deterministic part of the deal; that’s the w
ay the earth turns in relation to the sun and not much – we hope – is going to happen to that. The variations in production from month to month are the more or less random variations of weather. January 2005 was a disaster, for example, because the collectors were under snow for most of the month. And unlike the car, I can't get up to the roof to shovel them off.
Inefficient from the point of view of electric production, I suppose, but very satisfying as a reminder that, after all, some things are still subject to Nature's arbitrary control.
