How Much Electricity Do Solar Panels Produce Per Square Foot

A typical american home will need 14 36 solar panels to cover their power bill and at least 227 square feet of rooftop space to accommodate the solar panels.

How much electricity do solar panels produce per square foot. How much energy does a solar panel produce per square foot. To get an accurate picture of how much energy a solar panel can produce you have to first take into account what type of panel technology is being used. The amount of energy that solar panels can absorb and then produce is measured in kilowatts kw. The amount of energy your home uses over a certain timeframe say a month is measured in kilowatt hours kwh.

5 hours x 290 watts an example wattage of a premium solar panel 1 450 watts hours or roughly 1 5 kilowatt hours kwh. For a 300 watt solar panel with dimensions 64 inches x 39 inches 1 61 meters squared or 17 31 square feet the peak instantaneous electricity production per square foot at stc is 14 58 watts per square foot. Some people associate solar power with heat because heat is associated with lots of sunlight but if there s too much heat your solar panels may not work as effectively. To produce the maximum amount of power per square foot a solar panel has to be well designed to handle temperature spectrum angle and amount of light.

That translates to just over 15 watts per square foot. How much energy does a solar panel produce. An array of this size can produce an average of 350 850 kwh of ac energy per month. For the sake of example if you are getting 5 hours of direct sunlight per day in a sunny state like california you can calculate your solar panel output this way.

Thus the output for each solar panel in your array would.