When the sun rises, the amount of sunlight reaching the panels starts increasing. When there is a measurable amount (a few Watts), the inverter switches on and starts supplying power to the grid.
Then, as the sun gets higher in the sky, the power coming from the panels rises and rises until it reaches the peak. The peak is higher during the summer months as the sun is higher in the sky and more watts of light energy are falling on the panel than compared to the low winter sun.
This is a photo of the graph on the inverter taken at the end of 14th September 2013.
Each column on the graph is an hour's generation. Each horizontal line is 25% of maximum output power. This was a good day to demonstrate how the energy generated changes during the day, since there was no clouds in the sky all day, and the change in output energy is purely due to the changing position of the sun in the sky.
The peak plateaus out at just under 75% power over lunchtime for about 3 hours. In mid-September, the sun is now too low in the sky even at midday to get 100% out of the panels. The array was generating for a total of 11 hours.
A total of 10.8kWh generated for the day is certainly very respectable for a 1.92kW array. It will be interesting to see how this graph compares to midwinter, and then again at midsummer.
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