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Thursday, March 12, 2009

Solar panels does a 90 watt solar panel produce 90 watts per hour &?

Solar panels does a 90 watt solar panel produce 90 watts per hour &?
Concerning solar panels does a 90 watt solar panel produce 90 watts per hour? During sunlight hours I think I know that part of it. And let us just say I need 50kw per hour KWH correct? How many of the 90 watt panel would one need. Is there a simple formula that someone could tell me how to calculate this?

Sorry if these questions may seem stupid or perhaps they do not.

Thanks in advance for your help

Vince

Pat J is right on the first part. In perfect conditions a 90watt panel will produce 90 watts in one hour. But it's less than that once you include losses from converting it to AC (if you're doing that), transmission losses, weather too hot or cold, etc etc.

The 90watts would be a Laboratory BEST case. In the real world about 80 watts would be more accurate.

With the second part of the question, I think you've got it mixed up a bit, if you're talking about a house supply (which I'm not sure about). But you DEFINITELY wouldn't need a 50kw system for a house. You might need 50KWH per day for your house, but even this is very high. An average house uses between 15 and 30 KWH per day. To work out how big the system would need to be you need to find out what your location's sunlight hours are, and work it out from there. For example if you have 5 hours of sunlight per day you'd need 5 hours of a 10KW system to get 50KWH.

Or.. if you're NOT talking about a house and really DO need a 50kw system, then Pat's answer is fine, but don't forget to work in some buffer for the losses.

A 90 watt panel will produce 90 watts in one hour if the right amount of sunlight hits it for an hour. If you have a meter hooked up and it reaches 90 watts that means if the power of the sun stays the same for one hour then you would have put 90 watts in to your battery. We measure power by the hour.
To answer the other part of your question. One kilowatt is a thousand watts so you need to divide 50,000 by 90 to give you the number of panels you need.

They would if the sun was always shining 24 hrs. a day but if that happened we'd all be dead. Only works when full sunlight hits the panels luckily don't happen 24-7.

First of all do not feel bad, most people do not completely understand this.
The 90 watt panel will produce 90 watts at a time just like a light bulb with a 60 watt rating uses 60 watts. If your panel is in direct sunlight for an hour it will make 90watt hours of electricity or if it has 5 hours of direct sun it will make 450 watt hours of electricity. If you think about kw hours like miles per hour for your car it might make more sense, drive at 60mph for 3 hours and you will have gone 180 miles.
If you noticed when I did the calculation for the panel I said watt hours and not kilowatt hours 1kwh is like having the 90watt panel in direct sun for just over 11 hours or 11 of those panels for 1 hour. Just multiply the watts by the time and then divide watts by 1000 to get KW. Or in this case watt hours by 1000 to get KWH. This is how the power company charges you, how many kw times how long you used it to come up with the KWH you used during the month.
A 50kilowatt load is a huge amount of power. So I think we are not talking the right terms here 50 kw would be like running about 30 hair dryers at one time or 500 of the old 100watt incandescent light bulbs.
Here is a formula:
L * T = KWH
L is for the load in KW (if your load is in watts and not kilowatts you can skip the divide by 1000 later because you are already in W)
T is for the length of time that you need it for each day

Then to find what we need for production

KWH / SH = KW
KWH is the kilowatt hours you need per day
SH is the hours of usable sun per day (probably about 5)
KW the number of kilowatts of solar panels you need

Convert to like terms

KW * 1000 = W
1000 watts to make a KW

Now the # of panels

W / 90 = P
90 is your watts per panel
P is the # of panels

I make my own electricity with a wind turbine.

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