Edit: I should mention it’s a boat system so it’s not grid tied
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Assuming your system is not tied to the grid, no extra power is generated. Once the battery is charged the controller will not be allowing any power into the battery. This results in an open circuit on the panels, as if they weren’t connected to anything at all. The voltage across the panel will increase until the incoming sunlight balances the voltage, and the incoming sunlight power will turn into heat just like if you sat a black object in the sun.
Usually, solar panels are set up such that excess power is put back into the grid. The systems are also able to simply shut off and not produce any power at all, but that’s wasteful.
There’s a battery in solar panels that can be full? TIL
If you have a grid-tie system, depending on where you live– the electric utility buys power from you when you generate more power than you use.
Solar panels have U I curve very “straight” meaning open circuit voltage isn’t thet much higher than MPP point meaning you can disconnect them from inverter and they will be fine
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When sunlight hits a solar panel, it pops an electron off of the molecular structure. The free electrons usually travel through a wire. That movement of electrons is the usable electricity you think. If there’s nowhere for the electrons to go, they just reattach to the molecular structure and the extra energy is converted to heat.
Well hopefully you have a charge controller/conditioner connected to it, or else the power is going to keep going into your batteries and “boil” them, and that’s not a fun time.
Please tell me you have a charge controller.
So I have a further question/questions. A few years ago I got into wind instead of solar(I wish I went solar instead because looking back it seems like it would be a lot cleaner😭 dear god all the oil and grease I had to put up with) my question is are there any advantages to cooling solar panels (water cooling/passive cooling of some sort) or is heat a part of the production cycle like do they need to be at a certain level of heat to run optimally. Furthermore if you did have some type of switch set up would you be able to easily be able to make it to where when you are at full capacity would you be able to set it up to where it can switch over to the grid or would it require a large power conversion system: convert dc to ac through converter of some sort then through filter capacitor. Also please feel free to grill me on the process it’s been a while and I apologize for any wrong info I’ll be more than happy to edit my response accordingly. Summary: would it be easy to set up a switch to offload the excess power to the grid or would it require larger scale power conversion. 😁 thank you for adding more info/questions to the eli5 page
I live in a Campervan run only on solar power.
I have noticed that when I am in a place or a country where the ambient temp reaches 30-40°C the solar panels seem to be noticably less efficient than if I am in a place where the temp is lets say 20°C.
I am talking about a charge difference of about 50-100w, in total I have 840w worth of panels.
Does anyone know of that is in fact true or just in my head?
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