One year of solar power: Watt’s the deal?
Over a year ago we decided to take our responsibility as a company and install solar panels on our Almere office roof. After moving a couple of air conditioning units to make a little more room, we were able to install a whopping 61 parallel-connected solar panels in east/west orientation, hooked up to a SolarEdge inverter.
Each of these panels has 270 Watt-Peak (WP), which means the output power achieved under full solar radiation (under set Standard Test Conditions). During a full year we would of course not be able to produce this standard output of 61 × 270 = 16,470 WP, because of cloudy and rainy Dutch days, but it’s a great way to compare our panels with other solar panel installations. According to our installer the expected energy yield would be around 14,500 kilowatt hour (kWh) annually.
Now we’ve been producing solar energy for a full year, it’s good to take stock and see where we are. So in 2016, our office roof has produced 15,041 kWh, which is already more than we expected, nice! In this period our solar panels have saved around 5,900 kilograms of CO2 emissions, planted almost 20 “virtual” trees and powered over 45,000 light bulbs for one day. Awesome!
Now the not-so good news.
On average in leap year 2016, the panels produced 15,041 ÷ 366 = 41,10 kWh energy per day. The new office smart electricity meter tells us that all our monitors, servers, laptops, lights, air conditioning, sandwich grill and other equipment combined consume about 70 kWh on average per day throughout the year. That means we consume more energy than we are able to produce with our solar panels. Ouch :(
While we definitely reduced our need for grid power, we keep looking for ways to reduce our energy consumption. A good example of what we did is that we replaced the good old fluorescent tube lights in the dropped ceiling at the Almere office with energy-saving LED lights. Nice!
We will keep you posted on our continuing quest to reduce our energy footprint!
Originally published at www.elements.nl on January 10, 2017.
