Best Solar Panels for Cloudy Days

How Solar Panels Work on Cloudy Days?

There is a general misconception that a solar panel can’t produce electricity when direct sunlight is not available. The older generation of solar panels couldn’t but technological advances have helped us overcome this major hurdle.

In many regions of the world, direct sunlight is a rarity and a luxury for most of the year. Without these new generation solar panels, installing solar panels would be worthless. That said, let’s see how solar panels can be made to work in cloudy conditions.

Cloudy doesn’t imply any sunlight

Even on cloudy days, the sun is present in the sky and the clouds are just blocking the sunlight from reaching the earth. However, clouds do not block the sunlight completely. Some of it will penetrate the cloud layer and reach the earth. 

The solar panels will continue to generate electricity using the sunlight it receives even on cloudy days. The efficiency may be lower as compared to a bright and sunny day.

Choosing higher efficiency panels

Solar panels come in three basic categories – monocrystalline silicon, polycrystalline silicon, and thin-film panels. Of the three, monocrystalline silicon cells have the highest efficiency. This means for the same amount of incident sunlight, the electricity generated will be more. 

In places where there is sufficient sunlight, polycrystalline and thin-film cells are usually preferred for their lower price tags. However, if the need of the hour is to raise the efficiency of solar panels, the better choice would be monocrystalline silicon cells despite them being expensive.

Include a battery in the solar system

A solar battery can store the excess energy generated when the sun is shining bright. This stored energy can come to your rescue on a cloudy day when the system is generating less than required electricity. 

Using adjustable or tilting mounts

Typically solar panels are mounted after taking into account the direction and angle of incident sunlight. But as seasons change, the position of the sun also changes. This means that there will be a change in the direction and angle of incidence. 

When the sun is shining bright, this is not a big issue. The solar panels will continue to generate enough electricity to meet your needs. However, in cloudy climates, changing the position and inclination of solar panels can help in increasing efficiency. 

Using adjustable mounts for solar panels can help overcome this problem. You can either go for the manual one or an automatic solar tracker. A dual-axis solar tracker can raise the efficiency of solar panels by as much as 45-50%.

Add a luminescent solar concentrator (LSC)

Luminescent solar concentrators are devices consisting of a colored thin panel of glass or plastic coated with luminophores such as quantum dots, organic dyes, or rare-earth complexes. It also has a small PV cell located at the edges to convert solar energy into electricity.

LSCs absorb solar radiation over a large area and emit radiation of longer wavelengths. A bulk of the long-wavelength light is collected using total internal reflection and directed to the edges where the PV cells are located.  

LSCs can reduce the size of the solar cell and thereby the quantity of semiconductor material needed. This can bring down the cost of the installation. And, unlike solar trackers, LSCs don’t have moving parts nor do they need a cooling system. They are less expensive.