How many kWh would be produced in a year in the south of England (roughly)?

December 13, 2011 11:13 AM

How many kWh would be produced in a year in the south of England (roughly)?

Hi, I'm just interested to find out how much kWh would be produce (roughly) per annum so I can do some calculations to work out payback times for a potential solar PV system.

Thanks.

posted by sockpim to Science & Nature (4 answers total)

Just realised I left out the solar PV system size. It would be for a 4kW system.
posted by sockpim at 11:19 AM on December 13, 2011

I'm not doing the math but here is some data on daylight hours and cloud cover for the UK that you can use.

http://weatherspark.com/averages/stations/United+Kingdom
posted by srboisvert at 11:36 AM on December 13, 2011

See the link below:

http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/calculators/PVWATTS/version1/

Choose your location in England, and accept the defaults. Coincidentally, when I ran it, the default was a 4 kW system.
posted by V'Ger at 11:44 AM on December 13, 2011

Check out the Solar chapter in Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. He's quite negative on Solar PV as opposed to solar hot-water systems.

You are probably going to get more energy from a solar thermal system but the subsidy is bigger for PV, so that needs to be take into account in judging comparative economic, along with the value of displaced energy. The government is dicking around with subsidies for both systems, solar thermal will have the Renewable Heat Incentive from late next year (fingers crossed) and there is a down payment against that in place at the moment, but pretty much every decision about the RHI so far has been to downgrade the RoR and delay implementation so this may not be reliable.
posted by biffa at 4:43 PM on December 13, 2011