There are a lot of factors that can affect the performance of your solar panels and the economic benefits they can generate—things such as where you live and how sunny it is, how much you pay for electricity, which way your house faces—even the pitch of your roof. Variety is the spice of life, but the diversity of our architecture can affect the performance of solar panels. It’s important to understand how those differences in production performance related to the angle of your roof will affect the overall financial performance of your solar power system.
Regardless of where you live or what the angle of your roof might be, adopting solar power provides significant financial returns. The angle or pitch of your solar roof actually has less impact on solar panel performance than the direction it faces. In general, optimal production occurs when solar panels face east at a tilt equal to 15°. But what happens if your roof is flat? Lowering the tilt all the way down to 5° only decreases production by about 10%, regardless of where you live. The difference in production for steeper roofs is barely noticeable. Increasing the tilt from 15° to 25°, for example, results in a negligible decrease of about 1%.
Just like other variables that affect production, the financial impact of the slight decreases in productivity related to your solar panel roof’s slope, depends on electricity prices in Singapore. In higher price markets, the economic impact of these reductions can be greater, but the overall savings from systems installed in these markets are greater, too. The net result is still extremely attractive. For instance, if current electricity rate is 25 cents per kWh, decreasing your panels’ tilt to 5° will lower production by a little over 8%. Although this decreases your optimal annual savings by nearly $120, you will still save about $1,000 per year.
Again, these savings are significant in and of themselves, making solar power systems financially viable alternatives. There are added benefits, however, when property owners can take advantage of rebates from net settlement, so sub-optimal conditions can still deliver significant financial returns.
Assessing how the different performance variables will affect your financial outcome can get complicated, but Solar Era will offer FREE quotes and then automatically calculate the financial benefits each options provides, making it a lot easier to maximize the returns on your investment.
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