A year of solar energy

As I write this post, there’s a thick layer of snow covering everything. Trees and shrubs, roads and cars, houses and roofs, and, our solar panels. There will be no solar production today. Or for the next few days as the winter temperatures persist.

Bummer.

Yet expected.

Fortunately we have banked credits that will cover this snowy patch. To be certain, I took this opportunity to wade through the past year’s hydro bills.

Electrifying fun.

Our solar panels have been operational for a full year. It’s a good time for a review. I have also received a few questions about how the system is working so I thought I would share the information.

To recap, Guelph Solar installed 37 solar panels on our roof and a rockin’ AC/DC inverter on our hydro meter to convert the solar power to electricity we can consume. If we don’t use the electricity in real time it goes into the utility grid for later use or is banked. The system was hooked up mid-November 2020.

Let’s look at the data for the year 2021:

• Consumption was 12,013 kWh. This was roughly the same as 2020.
• Solar production was 13,448 kWh. We produced more energy than we consumed. Yeah.
• Approximately 4,626 kWh was consumed “real-time” (the remaining 7,387 kWh went into the utility grid for later use and/or was banked)
• Electricity charges decreased from $1,550 in 2020 to $250 in 2021. This is a savings of $1,300. Note: we started producing solar energy at a non-optimal time of year, and it wasn’t until our May hydro bill that we started to bank credits. Therefore total electricity charges will be even lower in 2022 now that we have a rolling bank of credits to draw from (currently at $1,700).
• Producing this amount of solar energy has saved 5,272 kg of CO2 emissions or the equivalent of 157 trees planted. These environmental benefits are calculated by the Solar Edge app using factors for CO2 and trees planted.

In sum, it’s working well. Good news.

It’s most efficient if we use electricity when it’s sunny out. For this reason, we try to charge our Bolt EV during the day. Since I have the excel worksheet charged up, I decided to also calculate the CO2 emissions saved from our electric car. So far we have driven 61,300 km which avoided burning 4,291 litres of gas (using a fuel efficiency of 7 litres/100 km). 1 litre of gas produces 2.21 kg of CO2 (NRC data) so that’s 9,483 kg of C02 emissions saved.

Together, that’s almost 15 tons of CO2 emissions avoided.

No sunshine on the solar panels today. However the sunset painted the sky pink, purple and orange this evening. It was a gorgeous sunset to cap off a very snowy day.