Question: i live using only solar pannels to get my electric, how much energy would i get out of them if it was really cloudy and gloomy all the time???:)

Mark Jackson answered on 16 Mar 2014:

It’s true that solar panels aren’t as efficient in cloudy conditions as during bright, sunny days. In fact, the production of solar panels is reduced by at least 50 percent on cloudy days, and may even by down to just 5 to 10 percent of what they can produce on sunny days.

You may be wondering how it’s even possible for solar panels to produce any electricity at all on cloudy days. The answer lies in the incredible technology used by a single solar cell, which takes the light from the sun, or photons (particles of light), and converts that to electricity thanks to silicon in the cells which reacts with the sunlight to generate an electrical charge. This is thanks to French scientist Edmund Becquerel for his discovery of what came to be known as the “photovoltaic effect” in the 19th century!

A number of solar cells are combined to form a solar panel, so that small charge created by a single solar cell is multiplied many times over to produce a significant amount of wattage from a whole panel. Solar panels perform best in sunny, unshaded conditions, so any type of shading or cloud cover can seriously affect a panel’s performance to the extent that, in extremely cloudy conditions, a panel may only operate at 50 percent efficiency. Multiply that by however many panels are in an array (an array of panels is basically a group of panels, which is what you normally need to supply enough power to run household appliances, electronics, etc.), and the fall-off in performance can be pretty dramatic.