I am doing research on solar panels and I am having trouble figuring out how much energy each one can produce in a given span of time. Knowing this would help me to approximate how many I would need to offset certain consumers in my home.
Lucky you! The National renewable energy Lab has already created an application to do pretty much what you’re looking for. It’s called pvwatts, and is linked below.
What you do is click on the map for the city nearest you, then enter the size of your proposed array, it’s tilt, and orientation. You’ll get a month-by-month printout of the expected energy output. This is based on historical measurements over almost 40 years, so takes into account local climate, such as fog, rain, and altitude.
If there is no reference city near you, you can still use another version of the program to do predictions for an arbitrary location.