1. Investigating Renewable Energy Data from Photovoltaic Solar Panels An EET Chapter

2. Solar Panel Usage Homes Schools Businesses

3. Easy Way to Track Solar Panel Data

4. Example: Gallager MS in Ohio

6. Your electric bill If you know your electric bill totals, you could do some calculations for solar panels My family uses 40 kWh per day, so this solar panel from Jan 2007 to Dec 2007 generated enough power to run my house for 5 days

7. Another good website for tracking solar panel energy

8. Another good website: solarschoolhouse.org

11. Harvard University Solar Panels During the last 4 years, these 60 solar panels provided 75% of the electricity needed to run my home Solar panels occasionally break If you don’t count breakage times, the 60 solar panels provided 94% of the energy needed to run my home

16. Questions to consider “How much power is this? Is it enough for all the lights in the school? Why would we want to use solar panels instead of the electricity from an oil or coal burning power plant or even a nuclear power plant?” (EET chapter on solar energy, part 3)

18. How much power is it? “So if we could have power at 2.04 kW for each hour of daylight in January, which is at best about 8 to 9 hours at this latitude, we would produce about 2 kW x 8.5hrs or about 17kWh”

20. Conclusion Solar panels are definitely part of the solution to generating electricity, but cannot generate enough by themselves Cloudy days inhibit solar panel production, as do snowstorms and parts breaking A school could not supply its electrical needs with solar panels