On cloudy or partly cloudy days, like today, I generate less electricity from my solar panels. Of course, that makes sense. <\/p>\n
The paradox is that on a partly cloudy day like today, although the power may fluctuate up and down as the clouds cover and then uncover the sun, the peak power is higher than on a clear sunny day. The most power I see on a sunny day is about 6.5 KW. This morning the power is peaking at about 7.5 KW.<\/p>\n
It’s pretty clear to me what is happening. When the sun breaks through the clouds and shines directly on the solar panels, it is also reflecting off the nearby white clouds, increasing the total amount of sunlight that hits the panels. Similar to how you can get a worse sunburn on snow, or on the beach. Reflected sunlight combines with direct sunlight to increase the total insolation. <\/p>\n
It doesn’t make up for the losses when the sun is covered, but it does help to mitigate it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On cloudy or partly cloudy days, like today, I generate less electricity from my solar panels. Of course, that makes sense. The paradox is that on a partly cloudy day like today, although the power may fluctuate up and down as the clouds cover and then uncover the sun, the peak power is higher than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}