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Calculating solar insolation

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GW@PE:
Have you ever wondered, or read about someone else's solar panel performance, and wondered how much solar energy these panels were exposed to, to make this power.  I had the desire to know how much power a 1kW solar array could produce say at latitude 50N at different times during the year.  It was unlikely I would live there to measure it.

I was able to find some seriously complicated spreadsheets that could calculate the sun angle, as well as other stuff at say, this Latitude and Longitude, on this year, on this day at this hour, minute, and second, but this is not really useful if you wanted to get a feel for how the available solar energy falling on a standard horizontal flat surface anywhere on earth changed throughout the seasons.

It would be nice to also have a visual representation in addition to a calculated value for the solar day. 

To cut to the chase, I have written a little program that runs in a Windows environment that does this. 

The program, I offer, is not a precise scientific tool, and I have made a few shortcuts to simplify the maths.  The most noticeable is, the year has 360 days, instead of 365.25. 

The about menu gives help type info on program controls.

The calculated solar energy for the approximate day number is displayed on top right of screen.  This would be for a cloud free day.  Obviously solar panel sizing, thermal specs, and orientation need to be factored to work out actual power for an array.

Gordon.

Wolvenar:
Looks interesting

oztules:
Good to see you here Gordon. Look forward to any projects you may be playing with.

Your program won't run under wine.... guess I'll have to fire up the windows partition.... and have a look.


................oztules

tomw:

--- Quote from: oztules on January 28, 2012, 02:07:40 pm ---
Your program won't run under wine.... guess I'll have to fire up the windows partition.... and have a look.


................oztules

--- End quote ---

Funny, it runs under Wine here fine on Ubuntu 11.04

Tom

rossw:
I wrote a web-based app about 7 months ago that I will try to dust-off and finish. It's a little bit similar.

It lets you enter the alignment of your panels, your location (lat/long), and a couple of other critical variables - if your panels track the sun in 0, 1 or 2 axis, and how far it tracks (if it has limited movement).

It will then calculate the theoretical clear-sun watt-hours and lists the results month-by-month, and a yearly total.
I think I had a few more things in it, like time-of-day demand etc, but its long enough now I forget!

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