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Odd morning production

GXMnow

Solar Wizard
Joined
Jul 17, 2020
Messages
2,673
My Enphase solar power system has been up and running for almost 2 years, but yesterday was the first time I have seen this happen.
Odd morning production.PNG
The bars are so far this morning, and that looks totally normal. The lighter grey line was this same day last year, and it also looks normal. But look at the darker blue line graph. At 7 am it started producing more than it ever has that early in the morning, and it ramped up like that, for almost 2 hours, making power at a rate about 30 minutes earlier than it normally does. I am certainly not going to complain about making more power, but I am trying to figure out what may have caused this. I am used to haze and cloud cover causing issues, but that usually is a drop in power. This is clearly more power than I normally gt in the morning. At this time, the sun is low in the sky and the angle is bad. Could there have been a perfectly positioned nice white cloud reflecting light right onto the panels? Whatever was causing it ended just before 9 am and it fell back onto a fairly normal trace from there on. The total for the day was very close to my best day ever. 31.3 KWH's works out to 6.52 sun hours. The system only just touched clipping in one 15 minute slot as it was fairly hot, with the air temp well into the 90's. The panels were probably much hotter and we did not have much wind to help cool them.

Before I cut down my palm trees, I did see a few day were the clouds made the shaded panels actually make more power than usual while the panels in the clear were down to half. This must have been something similar, but instead of shading, it was the sun being at a very low angle, and the cloud reflected or diffused the light to better hit the panels.

Has anyone else seen things like this happen?
 
Perhaps a once-a-year reflection off of a window due to the angle of the sun and their relative position?
 
At the time of day and the position of my panels, I can't imagine what could have been the reflector, except a nice white cloud in the perfect spot. Or the Goodyear blimp was hovering around for an hour. I did not notice it happened until the event was over, so I was not able to check if it was just some panels, or most of them. And I didn't even know to walk out and see what was going on. Now that today is over, and I can directly compare the full day result, I can see that I made a solid 700-800 watt hours more from that morning bump. We also had a few light clouds today, so I saw a dip around 11:30 am and again at 3 pm, but those didn't cut total production much. I still made 30.4 KWH's today, vs the 31.3 KWH's yesterday.
 
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