2022 Summary
Went through 2022 without any updates. But I have another year of data, so we can do year by year comparison to see if anything changed significantly.
According to NREL (recall that is the government agency that made the PVWatts software), the median solar panels lose 0.5% efficiency per year. Hmm, that doesn’t sound like too much. Below is my 2021 total output of 7,132 kWh. Taking 0.5% of that, is 36 kWh, which is just over a day of peak production in the summer or 1.5 days in the winter. Not much. A rainy day or two.
No way we could confirm efficiency loss in year 2. Weather is a much bigger uncertainty. But we have? data now, so let’s crunch the numbers and see if we showed any loss in production. Below is is 2022 monthly and annual production.
Year 1 was spot on with the model. March and April of 2022 really outperformed the model. It was a dry first half of the year. April especially, 27.6% higher than modeled. Annually, 2022 was 4.9% better than model. So using annual production is a bad way to look for degradation.
You space people may know that the Sun’s cycle hit the solar minimum in Dec ‘19. Solar maximum is expected in 2025. More gains comin…..(Really, i dont think it affect local intensity significantly)
Here is the best daily total output I saw. Roughly 30 days apart. Pretty close year 1 to year 2.
These are the peak output values. Using them as what could be, we can start to look at how close we might be to a “perfect “ month. That would be everyday at peak production.
For example, Perfect April:
Peak day: 30.9 kWh x 31 days =958 kWh
April 2022: 809.9 / 958 =85% perfection
Maybe other months were closer to perfection…..
Anyway, that was year 2.
Here is a Tesla referral link if you need one:
https://ts.la/zach38035
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