Solar Power 101: How The Best Solar Panels Cope with Shade

Many homeowners who have solar panels installed on their roofs worry about one thing the most: shade. Having shade over your solar panels is inevitable. It also brings a valuable impact to the operation and power generation performance of your solar panels.

Shades can come from the clouds, the leaves that have fallen from trees close to the panels, or it could be due to a structure that overshadows your home at a certain time of the day.

However, thanks to the best solar panels available to date, such as the Solid State Solar’s solar solutions, shading has become less of a problem for many solar panel owners.

Below are a few shading scenarios which you can possibly experience:

1. Spot Shadows

Say the spot shadow coming from a single leaf fallen from a tree and landed onto your solar panel. This shadow may not seem much. However, it can actually have a huge impact on your solar panels’ sunlight collection and power generation capabilities.

Solid State Solar’s solar panels are designed to keep solar energy flowing independently on parallel rows. This means that each cell row deploys versatile and redundant paths to allow power to move from one cell to another. Thus, a spot shadow delivers a very minimal to zero impact on the panel’s performance.

2. Linear Shading (Landscape or Portrait Orientation)

A linear shadow delivers a greater impact on a solar panel’s performance compared to a spot shadow. If the linear shadow is on a portrait or landscape orientation, conventional panels typically shut down one of the three zones for electricity in order to deviate from the shading.

Most conventional solar panels will typically experience an average of 33% power loss when subjected to linear shading. However, industry-grade solar panels such as Solid State Solar’s only experience a maximum of 17% power loss. Therefore, even if our solar panel experiences linear shading, its performance will not be heavily affected.

Conclusion

As shading is bound to happen one way or another, having a reliable solar panel that offers the capability to withstand shading is extremely important.

At Solid State Solar, we are well aware of the possible scenarios that may affect solar panels’ efficiency and power generation capabilities. Therefore, we make sure that all of our solar solutions can bypass all the obstacles that may undermine our panels’ performance.