What Can I Come Up Against With Solar Panel Projects Over the Winter?

Posted by Rolf Joho on November 19th, 2009 filed in Global Warming

If you live in a region that experiences severe winters you may want to know if your house is a good candidate for solar panels. After all, days or weeks of dark skies, snow flurries or heavy rains hardly seem compatible with a technology that depends on the sun to run it.

But the last 10 years have brought a lot of innovation and progress to solar panel technology. Now solar technology is far enough along that solar panels can easily produce electricity even during inclement weather conditions.

Are Solar Panels Risky During The Winter? Click The Link!

If yours is an off grid system which works independently from a power utility system, your solar energy system should have a set of back-up batteries. These batteries are like the ones used in cars. They are made to hold any extra power that your solar panels generate during the day. If your battery storage system is correctly designed for your locale, it will include the right number of these batteries to store power for the number of cloudy days that are usual for your geographical area.  

If you have a system that is connected to the grid of your local electric utility company, then you won’t require back-up batteries. When the sun goes down at night, or during a spell of inclement weather obscuring the sun for days, your power system will automatically get electricity from your local energy company. You’ll still be enjoying the benefit of reduced electric costs because on sunny days your electricity will be coming from your own solar panels.

An Article on A Solar Energy Project

In some areas, you may even be able to sell power back to your local power company. This is yet another way solar panels can prove cost effective. The way this works is that excess power produces by your solar panels flows back into the company and you received credit for it on your bill.  So even when you need to use power from the grid at night or on overcast days, the excess that was produced by your solar panels can still be used to reduce your overall utility bill.

Have You Thought About a Solar Panel Project?