Solar Eclipse And How Does It Affect Solar Panels

As the shadow of the moon covered the sunlight rapidly it also reduces the amount of energy being produced by the solar panels.

Solar eclipse and how does it affect solar panels.

Solar power is becoming an increasingly dominant source of energy and so while it might be strange to consider the impact of infrequent phenomena like eclipses as solar energy rises in. On august 21 a solar eclipse will obscure the sunlight needed to generate electricity at approximately 1 900 utility scale solar pv power plants in the u s. As the solar eclipse started to end the shadow slowly moves away from the solar panels. Likewise solar panels demonstrated the decrease in energy with mathematical precision.

The graphs below show a normal sunny august morning s energy output vs the output on the morning of the eclipse and as you can see when it would normally be producing about 5 700 watts the array bottomed out at just above 200 watts. This causes the energy production to rapidly increase. Power companies watched the 2015 european eclipse carefully to see what impact if any the eclipse had on the much more heavily solar dependent countries like germany.