What time of the day and during the year does a solar system work?

Solar systems work best when the sun is shining. As the strength and angle of the sun varies throughout the day and seasons, so too does the strength of the sun's radiation and this affects the amount of electricity your solar power system will generate. The highest solar generation during the day is usually from 11am to 4pm.

Days are longer in summer and shorter in winter and correspondingly, the amount of electricity generated through the same solar power system, in the same location changes with the seasons. This means that some solar systems can generate twice the electricity in Summer, than in the short days of winter.

A sample of how the energy generation varies throughout the year based on data from a real 3 KW system sample in Wollongong, NSW provided in the graph below illustrates how generation changes throughout a year.