Google: Should You Spring Clean Google Solar Panels?
Google weighs on a little solar panel cleaning experiment. At the headquarters of Google in Mountain View in 2007, ever since they collected a 1.6 MW solar panel installation. They think that cleaning the solar panels make them more effective, so they collect the mountains of data for the study of these panels produce - after rain, after cleaning and at different times of the year.
The one is completely flat ones installed on carports, and second is rooftop ones that are skewed – They have this two special sets of solar panels on their campus. Rain does not do a good job of rinsing off the dirt they collect, since the carport solar panels have no tilt. And also from a sand field, the carports are situated across, which does not help the situation.
After they had been in operation for 15 months, they have to clean these panels for the first time and instantly overnight their energy output doubled. Again eight months later when panels are cleaned, their output instantly increased by 36 percent. In fact, they found that cleaning these panels is the #1 way to maximize the energy they produce, so they have added the carport solar panels to our spring cleaning checklist as a result.
The totally different story is the rooftop solar panels. Rain does an enough job of cleaning the tilted solar panel, indication shows that. A little dirt is collected in the corners, but the ensuing decrease in power output is fairly minute and cleaning tilted panels does not considerably raise their energy manufacture. They will allow Mother Nature take care of cleaning their rooftop panels, so for now.
The sooner they will be paid back by their investment that the more energy their panels produce, they have also been crunching numbers on dollars-and-cents. Google's system will pay for itself in about six and a half years, which is even better than they initially expected, their analysis now predicts this.
Check out these slides showing the effects that seasonality, tilt, dirt, particulate matter, rain and cleaning have on Google's solar energy output, if you want to know more about solar analysis.
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/should-you-spring-clean-your-solar.html
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