I am sure it protects us not only from lightning but also from alien attacks and EMP guns …

So I wrote about our lightning protection, installed together with our photovoltaic generator. Now our PV generator is operational for 11 months and we have encountered one alien attack, albeit by beneficial aliens.

The Sunny Baseline

This is the electrical output power of our generator – oriented partly south-east, partly south-west – for some selected nearly perfectly cloudless days last year. Even in darkest winter you could fit the 2kW peak that a water cooker or heat pump needs under the curve at noon. We can heat hot water once a day on a really sunny day but not provide enough energy for room heating (monthly statistics here).

Alien Spikes and an Extended Alien Attack

I was intrigued by very high and narrow spikes of output power immediately after clouds had passed by:

There are two possible explanations: 1) Increase in solar cell efficiency as the panels cool off while shadowed or 2) ‘focusing’ (refraction) of radiation by the edges of nearby clouds.

Such 4kW peaks lasting only a few seconds wide are not uncommon, but typically they do not show up in our standard logging, comprising 5-minute averages.

There was one notable exception this February: Power surged to more than 4kW which is significantly higher than the output on other sunny days in February. Actually, it was higher than the output on the best ever sunny day last May 11 and as high as the peaks on summer solstice (Aliens are green, of course):

Temperature effect and/or ‘focusing’?

On the alien attack day it was cloudy and warmer in the night than on the sunny reference day, February 6. At about 11:30 the sun was breaking through the clouds, hitting rather cool panels:

At that day, the sun was lingering right at the edge of clouds for some time, and global radiation was likely to be higher than expected due to the focusing effect.

The jump in global radiation at 11:30 is clearly visible in our measurements of radiation. But in addition panels had been heated up before by the peak in solar radiation and air temperature had risen, too. So the different effects cannot be disentangled easily .

Power drops by 0,44% of the rated power per decrease in °C of panel temperature. Our generator has 4,77kW, so power decreases by 21W/°C panel temperature.

At 11:30 power was by 1,3kW higher than power on the normal reference day – the theoretical equivalent of a panel temperature decrease by 62°C. I think I can safely attribute the initial surge in output power to the unusual peak in global radiation only.

At 12:30 output power is lower by 300W on the normal sunny day compared to the alien day. This can partly be attributed to the lower input radiation, and partly to a higher ambient temperature.

But only if input radiation is changing slowly, panel temperature has a simple, linear relationship with input temperature. The sun might be blocked for a very short period – shorter than our standard logging interval of 90s for radiation – and the surface of panels cools off intermittently. It is an interesting optimization problem: By just the right combination of blocking period and sunny period overall output could be maximized.

Re-visiting data from last hot August to add more dubious numbers

Panels’ performance was lower for higher ambient air temperatures …

… while global radiation over time was about the same. Actually the enveloping curve was the same, and there were even negative spikes at noon despite the better PV performance:

The difference in peak power was about 750W. The panel temperature difference to account for that would have to be about 36°. This is three times the measured difference in ambient temperature of 39°C – 27°C = 12°C. Is this plausible?

PV planners use a worst-case panel temperature of 75°C – for worst-case hot days like August 12, 2015.

Normal Operating Cell Temperature of panels is about 46°C. Normal conditions are: 20°C of ambient air, 800W/m² solar radiation, and free-standing panels. One panel has an area of about 1,61m²; our generator with 18 panels has 29m², so 800W/m² translates to 23kW. Since the efficiency of solar panels is about 16%, 23kW of input generates about 3,7kW output power – about the average of the peak values of the two days in August. Our panels are attached to the roof and not free-standing – which is expected to result in a temperature increase of 10°C.

So we had been close to normal conditions at noon radiation-wise, and if we had been able to crank ambient temperature down to 20°C in August, panel temperature had been about 46°C + 10°C = 56°C.

I am boldly interpolating now, in order to estimate panel temperature on the ‘colder’ day in August:

Air Temperature	Panel Temperature	Comment
20°C	56°C	Normal operating conditions, plus typical temperature increase for well-vented rooftop panels.
27°C	63°C	August 1. Measured ambient temperature, solar cell temperature interpolated.
39°C	75°C	August 12. Measured ambient temperature. Panel temperature is an estimate for the worst case.

Under perfectly stable conditions panel temperature would have differed by 12°C, resulting in a difference of only ~ 250W (12°C * 21W/°C).

Even considering higher panel temperatures at the hotter day or a non-linear relationship between air temperature and panel temperature will not easily give you the 35° of temperature difference required to explain the observed difference of 750W.

I think we see aliens at work again:

At about 10:45 global radiation for the cooler day, August 1, starts to fluctuate – most likely even more wildly than we see with the 90s interval. Before 10:45, the difference in output power for the two days is actually more like 200-300W – so in line with my haphazard estimate for steady-state conditions.

Then at noon the ‘focusing’ effect could have kicked in, and panel surface temperature might haved fluctuated between 27°C air temperature minimum and the estimated 63°C. Both of these effects could result in the required additional increase of a few 100W.

Since ‘focusing’ is actually refraction by particles in the thinned out edges of clouds, I wonder if the effect could also be caused by barely visible variations of the density of mist in the sky as I remember the hot period in August 2015 as sweltry and a bit hazy, rather than partly cloudy.

I think it is likely that both beneficial effects – temperature and ‘focusing’ – will always be observed in unison. On February 11 I had the chance to see the effect of focusing only (or traces of an alien spaceship that just exited a worm-hole) for about half an hour.

_____

Further reading:

On temperature dependence of PV output power:

• Current-voltage curve of a solar cell – containing a temperature-dependent exponential function.
• The effect of temperature in depth.

On the ‘focusing’ effect:

• Can You Get More than 100% Solar Energy?
  Note especially this comment – describing refraction, and pointing out that refraction of light can ‘focus’ light that would otherwise have been scattered back into space. This commentator also proposes different mechanism for short spikes in power and increase of power during extended periods (such as I observed on February 11).
• Edge-of-Cloud Effect

Source for the 10°C higher temperature of rooftop panels versus free-standing ones: German link, p.3: Ambient air + 20°C versus air + 30°C