Photovoltaic Panels Update

At the end of the post titled “Photovoltaic Panels” of September 8th, I talked about my intention to extend my PV system. I did, and here is a new picture of my roof showing the new array.

Photovoltaic Panels

Advertisements for solar panels have begun appearing on Australian television. At least, they have become frequent enough that I noticed them. Obviously, the purpose of the ads is to encourage the viewer to buy solar panels, but they tend to be misleading. By selling the electricity you generate, you eventually repay the acquisition price of the photovoltaic system. That’s true. It is also true that your electricity bill is reduced and can even go negative (which means that you get money from the utility). But you shouldn’t consider the two facts simultaneously true. After all, the utility pays you only once!

In this post, I will describe what I think is the financially correct way to look at the photovoltaic panels. But to start, I will first tell you what system my wife and I have bought.

We have on the roof eighteen panels manufactured by Sharp (model NT-N5E3E), as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Our panels.

Each panel can nominally generate up to 175 W of power. Therefore, our maximum generating capacity is 3,150 W.