We've reached the end of the first, almost full, month of operation of the Oxy solar array so I thought I'd write to update聽everyone on what is going on up there and provide some context for what it all means.
Oxy community,
We've reached the end of the first, almost full, month of operation of the Oxy solar array so I thought I'd write to update聽everyone on what is going on up there and provide some context for what it all means. 聽Here's what the first month looked like:
As you can see we started generating power on March 4th which, linguistically, is a good day to start something big.聽聽Unfortunately the marching didn't go too well the first few days. 聽On March 6th we had all 3 inverters (shown in the three colors聽dark blue, light blue and orange) working but on the 7th the light blue one blew a fuse. 聽That took 11 days to get fixed. 聽Fingers聽crossed that it stays fixed. 聽Since then the array has performed well. 聽The variation in the height of the bars reflects the variation in聽the solar radiation on those days. 聽The red line shows what we would expect on average.
Now what do all these numbers mean? 聽I want to first call your attention to the units. 聽Most households measure their聽electrical energy usage in kWh which is 1,000x times smaller than the units natural for our array, MWh. 聽This array generates a lot聽of power! 聽On average, over the course of the year, my production model predicts that our array will generate about 4.7 MWh per聽day. 聽According to this聽聽the average LADWP household uses about 14.8 kWh per day. 聽So on an average day we generate聽enough energy to supply about 318 average LADWP homes with energy. 聽That's all the houses circled in the Google map below.聽聽(Yes I counted them). 聽It'll be half of that in December and twice that in July.
This month we made 126 MWh whereas my solar model predicts 140 MWh. 聽Of course we weren't operating for several days聽and the inverter blew a fuse so I wasn't expecting these numbers to match. 聽I actually pleasantly surprised at how close they are. 聽I聽have a feeling my solar model is a little too simplistic and perhaps conservative. 聽Our array is pretty complicated to model! 聽For聽those of you who like to keep score I'm predicting we will generate 155 MWh in April. 聽We'll see.
If you are interested in climate change, 1 MWh translates into 0.665 metric tons of CO2 not emitted into the atmosphere, on聽average according to data obtained聽聽for the LADWP, very close to the national average. 聽So this month's generation of 126聽MWh means that 84 metric tons of CO2 did not go into the atmosphere.
Taking into account that we pay different rates depending on when we make our energy the 126 MWh that we produced, or聽didn't use, this month translates into $12,932 saved over the last month in utility bills, a little more than $100 per MWh. 聽Our聽electrical bill is very complicated and the savings are actually larger but that is a story for another day.
Once again, if you want to log in yourself you can go to,
Login ID = oxysolar
Password = 1600solar
Enjoy!