May 2011 Daily Results

It has been wet, cloudy, and not very bright in Guelph since mid-April. Not so great for solar or the farmers. We need the rain to keep the dust off the panels and to help the crops grow, but not this much!
The daily solar data is shown in the figure below. I cheated a bit - the first couple of days of June have been so sunny that I had to download the data off my Fronius datalogger to see how many kWhr we generated. I get wo pleased to the see the sun on the panels and the Fronius inverter purring away in the garage. These data are included in the daily results to date. The beginning and end of May had several days where generation was 20 kWhrs. Despite the intermittent cloud, the generation has been quite good on sunny days. My observations:

• 1, 2, 3 June 2011 - 33.5, 32.9, 32.4 kWhr respectively are the about equal to a few days in early May
• 1 June is 15 hrs 11 min 9 long whereas 1 May is 14 hrs 19 min long! Of course sky clarity is not equal between these dates and can be a notable factor
• 15 April is only 13 hr 25 min long and we generated 35.1kWhr, and 24 March is only hr min long yet 35.0 kWhr was generated
• Despite the cloudy days, overall generation has been fair to very good, meaning we are catching up nicely from the winter generation drop
• May generated 534 kWhr, or $428. This is a little below my RETScreen.net model which predicted 667kWhr in May for our system. This makes sense as May 2011 was generally recognized as much cloudier and rainy than normal.

Now, the important thing is to see the revenue generation that is resulting from the chart above. The chart below shows the daily revenue plus the daily loan equivalent [I pay loan biweekly].

There are indeed many days in May that are below the $10.70 daily loan equivalent, but whew!, it sure isn't December again!. Maximum daily generation in May was $26.83, the minimum was $2.98, avg $13.82.