Sunlight

Abstract

When we are curious about the amount of sunshine in a particular region, it’s normally because we’re thinking of moving or visiting there. We may think of Miami as a quintessential sunbelt city and New York as its opposite. Yet measured sunlight in these two cities is very similar during the summer because of the cloudy conditions in Miami and the longer days in the North. From the standpoint of PV, that can be important, because some near-term applications of PV (for summer air-conditioning) depend more on summer sunlight than annual sunlight. We need to know more about sunlight—the solar resource—and its variations, in order to have a more precise idea of how to use PV successfully.