Photovoltaic Roof East Facing Los Angeles

I would be grateful for any thoughts suggestions on the direction to face solar panels.

Photovoltaic roof east facing los angeles.

Rooftop solar panels in north america face south. Looking at data from six cities boston los angeles new york chicago philadelphia and washington d c we estimated the production levels generated at various tilt angles. New guidelines from the california energy commission call for a 15 percent higher rebates for west facing solar arrays than for south facing solar panels. Solar panels facing east or west won t get as much light as those on a southern facing roof.

Around the world solar developers are turning array designs on their head and choosing to go east west instead. Following on from a recent feature in pv tech power volume 14 here are the five key. One solution is to compensate by increasing the solar collector area either using more panels or larger collectors. That s just the way we do it.

But california recently began to incentivize west facing panels over south facing solar. We are looking at installing a 5kw system lg neon 2 panels and fornius inverter on a double storey house and had initially thought of splitting the panels between our north east and west facing roofs so that we got production over most of the day 8 panels north 4 east and 4 west. We held the azimuth constant at 180 which in layman s terms means we always assumed that the roof faced directly south. On occasion a south facing rooftop is not feasible because the available space can only fit one or two modules.

Increase the south facing tilt to 15 and south facing becomes 21 better. We offer residential commercial solar solutions to clients across el segundo los angeles riverside santa monica long beach hermosa beach redondo beach manhattan beach anaheim pasadena san bernardino and culver city california. Solar panel installation roof coating solutions in el segundo california. I did a quick check using nrel s pvwatts tool and it looks like in placentia ca there s about a 10 difference in favor of flat south facing panels over east facing panels installed on a 30 pitched roof.

Here are several other reasons to orient your array more towards the east or west.