How Much Does Dust Affect Solar Panels

Dust on pv panels does make a difference but it s not a big enough factor in california to warrant cleaning said felipe mejia the first author on the study and a graduate student in environmental engineering in kleissl s research group at the jacobs school of engineering at uc san diego.

How much does dust affect solar panels.

Cleanliness may be next to godliness but more to the point. Grit and grime can cut solar panels output by more than 35 in certain areas of the globe a new paper reports. Google conducted a groundbreaking experiment at their 1 6 mw solar farm in mountain view california. Dust effect on solar panel increase as the tilt angle of incident increases.

Investigated effect of dust on pv performance as function of tilt. Why should i clean my solar panels. As soon as your panels are out in the open in the clean air or not so clean air dust. One of the reasons for this is dirt.

The day your solar panels are installed is the day you will get the best performance out of them. Power loss rise from 23 in normal incident to 4 7 24 8 at 58 for radiometer bird dropping one of the issues in this study. We know that dust dirt pollen bird droppings and other debris can negatively affect solar panel efficiency. Admittedly it is a very shallow hill and it might take over 40 years to get to the bottom but day one is going to be as good as it gets.

But a small percentage around 8 percent was from. After cleaning the study s solar panels saw a 50 percent jump in efficiency.