May 2009 PV & EV Report

Flowers in Rain Urn (barrel)

May of this year has had awesome solar performance, better than May of last year and even better than June and August of 2008. Last year May had record rainfall and poor solar power performance due to a dreaded upper level low.

This year, on the 14th, we hit a 3.7kW peak power level. This is the highest output that we have had; bigger than the 3.5kW days that we had in June and July last summer. It was a little cloudy that day. So how could this be better than a clear day? In addition to the direct sunlight hitting the panels, we were likely getting reflection and/or refraction from the surrounding clouds.

At first, I wondered if this new peak power was due to the new inverter. Perhaps it was more efficient and we were going to be getting consistently higher numbers. Then the values returned to be inline with prior results from the old inverter.

On the 17th, we had another brief electric outage. This time it did not break our inverter (see last month).

PV Energy Results for May 2009 = 623kWh

These 600+ kWh sailed us across the 5 megawatt-hour milestone with the month ending at 5280kWh.

Our best day in May was the 24th when the system generated 25kWh.

As for EV driving, I logged 395 miles in my EV, using ~275kWh. The graph below shows that the PV system has now produced more energy this year than the EV has used. The yellow line (net energy) is now back above zero for the year. Drivin' on Sunshine!