April 2020 Milestone

4/11/2020

As of 5 PM today, we are 21 days into the Illinois "stay at home order".  Our community lifestyle has dramatically changed over thes last 3 weeks.  Because of the order, our buying, traveling and social habits have been minimized to only the essentials.  When I do venture out, the road traffic is minimal.  I have been able to take my neighborhood walks, but social distancing is practiced by almost every one I "meet".  Clearly, life today is different and won't revert to normal for some time.

But, the grass is green and it continues to grow.  The trees have started to bud.  Our Cornelian Cherry Dogwood has blossomed with yellow flowers.  The pollen count is high.  And the sun is rising earlier every day and races to a higher zenith.

The sun part is great for the solar system that was installed in the latter part of December last year.

At this time, my daily ritual is to mentally note where the sun is rising and then check the solar production monitoring application.  Several checks during the day are standard.

April 2020 has brought several different milestones.

Milestone #1 is surpassing 3 MWh of total energy produced, reached in earlier April.

Milestone #2 is achieving the highest level of daily solar energy production, thusfar, at 76.83 KWh produced on April 10, 2020.

 

The chart to the right is taken from the monitoring application display.  It shows centrally the System Production (76.83 KWh), and it also shows the line graph of the Kw energy produced by the solar panel against time.

The granularity of the plot is 15 minute segments.  It shows that the first energy received by the system was in the 6:15 AM segment and was a mere 0.024 KW.  The last bit of energy received was at 7:15 PM and was 0.022 KW.  Peak energy was received at 9:00 AM, 11:30 AM and 1:30 PM, and is limited to 10 KW.

The more abrupt growth of the curve and more gradual downward slope of the curve is a function of the panel and roof position and the path and height of the sun.





Another milestone occurred March 20, 2020 when I received my first ComEd (local power company) billing with a full month of solar production.  It was great to see that the prior billing period reflected a flow of 790 KWh of energy "from the grid", and a flow of 957 KWh of energy TO the grid.  My monitoring system does not yet tell me how much self-generated energy (solar) that I consumed at home, but some simple math can tell me this.

[For Billing Period 2/192020 - 3/19/2020]

Solar Energy produced                               = 1285 KWh
Solar energy pushed to the ComEd Grid =   957 KWh

Solar energy self-consumed                     =   328 KWh
ComEd additional energy required         =   790 KWh
Total Energy required                                = 1118 KWh

So, you may ask, Why do you need to acquire energy from ComEd if your solar system produced more than you required in the billing period?
The answer is that the sun is up only during the day making solar energy.  My consumption is 24 hours a day.  And on some of those billing days, I charged my electric cars in the middle of the night.

Please keep safe and healthy my friends.  Everyone is so dependent on each other to lessen the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.  As long as the sun continues to shine, we will make it to the other side of this panemic.  I am anxious to see you all then.