What do I need to know to find out how much PV I can put in 1 acre?
What do I need to know to find out how much PV I can put in 1 acre?
Comments
Judy,
You need to follow these steps:
Do a site survey - is there any shading? Is the full acre of sunlight available all year? You can buy or rent this tool: Solmetric SunEye
Figure out your latitude - this will determine the tilt of your solar array and the spacing between rows.
Figure out the slope of the property - if the slope is considerable, you may want to go with pole mounted arrays or trackers.
Figure out if you're going to be charging batteries or back-feeding the grid. If you are backfeeding the grid, determine what the utility feed-in rates will be.
Once you have this information, you can lay out the PV for maximum kWh generation over a full year.
Generally you can get about 250kW of crystalline PV modules fixed mounted on an acre. How much energy that will produce will depend on many other things such as direction, shade, location, etc.
You illustrate a good point: If one were to cover an acre with PV, then one could probably get closer to 600kW. It's the solar resource and the site design that determine the maximum installable PV system. An "Acre" of SolarWorld 240 Monos at 18 Square Feet each will equal 580kW at STC, but that isn't really practical to install unless you have 1 acre of uninterrupted, flat racking.
Comments
Judy,
You need to follow these steps:
Once you have this information, you can lay out the PV for maximum kWh generation over a full year.
Generally you can get about 250kW of crystalline PV modules fixed mounted on an acre. How much energy that will produce will depend on many other things such as direction, shade, location, etc.
mhamon,
You illustrate a good point: If one were to cover an acre with PV, then one could probably get closer to 600kW. It's the solar resource and the site design that determine the maximum installable PV system. An "Acre" of SolarWorld 240 Monos at 18 Square Feet each will equal 580kW at STC, but that isn't really practical to install unless you have 1 acre of uninterrupted, flat racking.