one should work as it can provide up to 500mW. But that’s only in perfect conditions (full sun). In order to size our panel, we need to figure out how much energy our panel will get in a day at the geographical location we intend to put it.
You can find how much solar energy your panel will receive from
As an example, we’ll take Barcelona, Spain, as the location. To make sure our panel will work even under the worst conditions, we’ll use the month of January for our calculations. From the website we get:
The average energy received per day is:
In a full day, we get
The key point here is that we can’t extract 100% of the sun’s energy. From the panel datasheet, we can see that it has a surface of
, and that can it can extract 500mW. That’s only 86.5W/m2, much less than the 1000W/m2 that was shining into it.
