not higher, but broader

Another month of solar power generation, another blog post.  Looking at the sunniest day (as determined by total power generation) of each month, we see:

The horizontal time axis runs from 3:00am to 9:00pm GMT (no correction for summer time: this is all sun time!). The vertical axis runs from zero to 8kW.  The black line is the generation on the particular day.  The orange regions indicate the minimum, lower quartile, median, upper quartile, and maximum generation at that time, over the respective month.

The total power generated on the sunniest day each month (essentially sunny all day) was 26.5 kWh on 13th January, 41.4 kWh on 16th February, 52.0 kWh on 24th March, and 55.9 kWh on 16th April.

In the March and April plots we start to see saturation: we have an 8kW system, and so the top of the curve flattens around noon as the system generates at full capacity.  So the plots can go no higher.  But the April plot is clearly broader than March, indicating the lengthening days.  We look forward to May, and especially June, to see what happens at the maximum day length.

No wonder January feels so SAD…