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

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

sockpim — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:13:44 -0800

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.

By: sockpim

sockpim — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:19:39 -0800

Just realised I left out the solar PV system size. It would be for a 4kW system.

By: srboisvert

srboisvert — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:36:58 -0800

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

By: V'Ger

V'Ger — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:44:08 -0800

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.

By: Dasein

Dasein — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:44:38 -0800

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.

By: biffa

biffa — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:43:44 -0800

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.