Friday 8 September 2023

Solar Farm

There were a lot of solar farms in the south west. This is Tower Hill Solar Farm by the M5 in Gloucestershire. I worked it out from the brilliant interactive renewables map. The planning page gives the power is 6.5MW with 8.05MWp. I was interested in the latter units. It stands for peak MegaWatts, the peak power. There is a lot more info here. Essentially, in practice a solar panel gets hot and does not generate as much. Also, they generate DC but the grid is AC so they need inverters to make that change. To reduce the cost of the inverter, one that is smaller than the peak power is usually used and the power clipped if it exceeds that of the inverter, so the inverter is a limit on the output power.