How much energy does a 1 KW Solar PV system produce?
Im thinking of buying a 1kw PV for the house. does anyone know (generally) how much these produce? is it upto 1kw per hour? or per Day.
someone i know says its 1 kw per day. that doesnt seem very useful in reducing power consumption.
It’s easy to mix the terms "kWh" and "kW" but it can confuse listeners. kW is power. If you expend a certain power, say 2000 watts (= 2kW) for an hour, you’ve spent 2kWh in energy. (You probably understand this; apologies as needed…)
The solar industry around me, 25 miles east of San Francisco, says that a mounted solar panel (which doesn’t track the sun) will get the equivalent of 4.3 hours of sunlight on an average day. I had a company quote a small 1.5 kW system (4 panels I recall) and they wanted $11,000 for it. I understand there are some best-of-all-time rebates right now so the cost ought to be a lot lower than 11k.
So you can expect 4.3 kWh / day. That isn’t much energy. My electric bill showed over 500 kWh for the month and it was so cool this past month that we didn’t need air conditioning – so 500 kWh is a low figure for us (1140 sq ft, single story house, walnut creek, calif).
The posted comment about "tiered electric rates" is worth tracking down. A typical residence around us has a rate starting at 11.5 cents / kWh for the 1st 180 ish kWh, then the rate jumps to 13 cents, then to 22, then to 41 cents. If your setup can put a dent in the 41 cent usage, you may have a winner.
Also ask your power company if the panels don’t qualify you for a tamer electric rate. Around here, having professionally installed panels does qualify you for such a rate. Just having some panels may qualify you for a rate which ends up saving you some money.
You’re confused: a watt is already a unit of energy per unit of time. Dividing it by another time interval doesn’t make sense.
If it produces 1 kw, then it produces 1 kw. It means, for instance, you could power 10 100 watt light bulbs while it is running at full power.
You’re confusing kw with kwh, which means one hour of running at a kw of power. If it produces 1 kw, then it produces 1 kw always. For as long as the sun is shining.
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At a cost of 11,000.00 dollars for a system.
Good luck
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that’s like 3,000 square foot of solar panels getting at most 10 hours of sunlight per day. You would be better off planting 10 olive trees to get oil for a diesel generator…
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American TaleBan
A six panel system produces1kw per hour, in theory. It only does this around midday when the sun is directly over the panels. Most 1kwh installations provide about 4kw during the day to your house, if you are lucky, you may get 5 or 6 during a very hot day depending on cloud cover and any trees that may shade the panels.
Depending on where you live, anything you don’t use will be fed back into the grid, and you will be credited for this against your bill, that’s where the savings come in. If you are lucky enough to live in Melbourne, Australia, the electrical retailer will pay you 60c per kw that you put into the system, while you only pay about 16c for what you use off the grid.
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Getting a 1kwh system installed, with the Australian Government paying $8000 of the $9850 cost of installation.
The average ‘capacity factor’ of a solar PV system is something like 20% (in the US) or possibly even less.
So it produces an average of 0.2kW, which should be 4.8kWh/day. That’s a total of 1750kWh/year. A kWh is a ‘unit’ of electricity – a kiloWatt hour.
In the UK, it’s more likely to be half of that or less. (750-900kWh is the figure I’ve heard)
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In my area of California, such a system would produce about 1800 kWh a year. That may be financially worth it, if you’re on tiered electric rates.
What you can do is see if you have an electric bill from 1 year ago, and see how many kWh you use in a year. Then you can see what percentage of your energy usage you would be displacing.
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It’s easy to mix the terms "kWh" and "kW" but it can confuse listeners. kW is power. If you expend a certain power, say 2000 watts (= 2kW) for an hour, you’ve spent 2kWh in energy. (You probably understand this; apologies as needed…)
The solar industry around me, 25 miles east of San Francisco, says that a mounted solar panel (which doesn’t track the sun) will get the equivalent of 4.3 hours of sunlight on an average day. I had a company quote a small 1.5 kW system (4 panels I recall) and they wanted $11,000 for it. I understand there are some best-of-all-time rebates right now so the cost ought to be a lot lower than 11k.
So you can expect 4.3 kWh / day. That isn’t much energy. My electric bill showed over 500 kWh for the month and it was so cool this past month that we didn’t need air conditioning – so 500 kWh is a low figure for us (1140 sq ft, single story house, walnut creek, calif).
The posted comment about "tiered electric rates" is worth tracking down. A typical residence around us has a rate starting at 11.5 cents / kWh for the 1st 180 ish kWh, then the rate jumps to 13 cents, then to 22, then to 41 cents. If your setup can put a dent in the 41 cent usage, you may have a winner.
Also ask your power company if the panels don’t qualify you for a tamer electric rate. Around here, having professionally installed panels does qualify you for such a rate. Just having some panels may qualify you for a rate which ends up saving you some money.
References :