A year of solar data

Our solar array has been up and running for a year now.  Since we have micro-inverters from Enphase, I'm able to log data every 5 minutes on how much solar power we're producing (you can browse a summary view of this data at Enphase's public page for our system).  I've saved this data over the entire year (over 70,000 data points).  Here are a few visualizations of the data.  First, a simple contour map of the raw data - blue is 0-2000 watts, red is 2000-4000 watts, and green is more than 4000 watts of instantaneous power being produced by the array:

This is the same data, but smoothed with a 5x5 box filter and viewed in perspective - it lets you see the longer weather events we've had (multi-day winter storms, extended summer cloudy intervals) - it gives the data an interesting "array of stacks" view:


And here is a chart showing the average-per-time-of-day and maximum-per-time-of-day power production (note that in all these charts time-of-day has been corrected for daylight savings).  The max is over 5 kilowatts, which is consistent with the design of the array.  The average peaks around 3 kilowatts - and note that we very frequently have cloudy weather in the 2-3 hours after noon in Colorado.  This shows up clearly in the average:


Over the past year, our array has produced 8.1 megawatt-hours of energy, averaging 20.8 kilowatt-hours per day.  As expected, this is roughly 2/3 of our electric use.  I'll see what other interesting data I can tease out of this in the coming weeks...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

GoPro Hero3 Black Field of View

Image
I got two  GoPro Hero3 Black cameras and am planning a panoramic project with them.  However, to do the project correctly and accurately, I need a good read on their field-of-view.  So, I set up a tripod and a grid and a tape measure, and took a few photos.  Here they are, desaturated and contrast-enhanced, with central red dots and some annotations.  First, measuring the diagonal FOV: Next, the horizontal FOV: Finally, the vertical FOV: The front of the camera lens was almost exactly 17 inches from the grid.  The camera body started about 17.25 inches from the grid.  Assuming the sensor is embedded some distance into the body, I used an estimated field-to-sensor distance of 17.5 inches.  This yields the following field-of-view, in degrees: Diagonal: 146 Horizontal: 121 Vertical: 93 Doing a little interval math on the field-to-sensor distance shows these angles are accurate to about plus or minus 1.5 degrees. Int...
Read more

Five Planets and the Moon

Image
I got up this morning very early to make an animation of Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, the Moon, Venus, and Mercury as they rose in the early morning sky.  Here is the finished product: It was very cold - 7 degrees Fahrenheight - and very early.  This is a 30-minute sequence starting at 5:39 AM and finishing at 6:09 AM.  All of the images have the same parameters: Canon 7DmkII camera Canon 8-15mm f/4L lens, locked at 10mm (widest useful zoom with this lens on a 1.6x crop camera) 8 second exposures at ISO 3200 Image sequencing performed by Canon's EOS Utility.  A capture was started every 15 seconds. That camera/lens combo yields a 180-degree diagonal field-of-view.  Jupiter and Mercury are about 120 degrees apart in these images, so this gives some extra room for animation and cropping. Capturing all five planets in the pre-dawn skyglow is surprisingly tricky, especially when city light pollution is contributing to a murky lower atmosphere. ...
Read more

August 21, 2017 Total Solar Eclipse

Image
Like millions of other people, we went chasing the Great American Eclipse. We chose Nebraska, since everybody we knew was going to Wyoming, and the climate models suggested a good probability of clear weather. Our initial camp was at Lake McConaughy, which is just inside the line of totality. My sister Danielle and her husband Edward got there early to start scouting. Our plan was to check weather forecasts and then go mobile the day of the eclipse. The morning of August 19 I got up early and snapped this shot of the moon on its way to its date with destiny: Sunday morning we checked the forecasts. It was not looking good for Nebraska in general, but east-central Nebraska seemed better than western according to the forecasts. So we packed up camp and headed out to Camp Augustine, a Boy Scout camp near Grand Island, Nebraska: They had camping spots available, and a large field which would be good for observations. After a rather hot, muggy, sleepless night (dry camping wi...
Read more