Solar Eclipse And How Does It Affect Solar Panels

In that instance germany saw a dip from 21 7 gw to 6 2 gw during the duration of the eclipse but was still able to provide the power needed by the german people.

Solar eclipse and how does it affect solar panels.

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. 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. 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. While solar power is still a small albeit rapidly growing contributor to the grid solar eclipses won t have a major impact on our electricity supply.

As the shadow of the moon covered the sunlight rapidly it also reduces the amount of energy being produced by the solar panels. 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. Likewise solar panels demonstrated the decrease in energy with mathematical precision.