Solar Electric Panels
Solar Electric panels, also known as photovoltaic panels or PV Panels generate power from any light source. The panels are rated by the power they produce when exposed to full sunlight. This power is measured in watts like a light bulb. Just like a light bulb, the higher the watt rating, the more powerful they are. A 100 watt panel produces twice as much power as a 50 watt panel.
The energy produced by the panels is simply their rated power times the number of hours
they produce energy, thus the basic units used to measure energy are 'watt-hours'. If you
leave a 100 watt light bulb on for 1 hour you have used 100 watt hours of energy. If you
leave it on for two hours, you have used 200 watt hours of energy. In the metro Denver
area of Colorado, we get an average equivalent of 5.5 hours of full sunlight per day. This
means that a 100 watt panel will produce, on average, 550 watt-hours per day or 16500
watt hours per month (550x30).
A thousand watts are called a kilowatt. A thousand watt-hours is called a kilowatt-hour and is abbreviated KWH. Xcel Energy and other electric utilities will track your energy usage in KWH. In the example above, Xcel Energy would print the 16500 watt-hours as 16.5KWH.
To determine how much energy you use in a month, you can look at your electric bill. It states the monthly usage in KWH. You can find out how much power you use over a year, using a January bill from this year and one from last year. Each bill will have the meter reading for that month. The meter reads in KWH. To find out how much you used, simply subtract last years reading from this years. For an average home, that will be about 7000-8000 KWH per year.
If you do the math, you will find that this is the amount of energy produced by 5 kilowatts of solar panels.
Provided by Vibrant Solar, Inc.