One often asked question is, “Does solar really work in Cincinnati”? The short answer is yes it does indeed. Every day the sun comes up and we see our solar power systems come online and start generating power. Now every day is not a great blue sky day here in Cinci, but we still have enough sunshine to generate some power. During our winter months we can have long stretches of gray weather, but our solar power systems still wake up with the sun and harvest all the available sunshine. The production graph below provides some insights.
This chart shows production and consumption data for a home in the Cincinnati area. We commissioned this system just before Christmas 2019. You can see that on most days the homes consumption exceeds the solar production. This is typical for our area in the winter. You can also note from the graph that New Years day was nice and sunny, and the solar production exceeded the homes consumption. As part of our solar installation service we work with the utility provider to get a net meter installed for the system. This allows the utility to look at the net consumption (utility provided power – solar provided power) and the customers bill at the end of the month will reflect only the net of power consumed from the utility. Looking at the graph above we can see that even with poor solar resources during the period the system produced roughly 30% of the homes energy needs. This will only improve as our days get longer and we head into summer. This system is expected to produce all of the homes electrical power for 10 months out of the year and offset the other 2 months. So yes, solar works in Cincinnati, and when we have a huge solar energy spill here we just call it a nice day.