A Suspect Solar Portal

I have been working with one of my clients on Solar Power, and as part of this looked at their Solar Portal in order to verify the data. This data came from an Aurora Solar Inverter, which has been purchased by ABB, hence their name on the image.

With a few minor redactions to remove the name of my client, this is exactly as presented to the user. In fact they have this being displayed in their office for visitors to see. The first thing to notice is that the measurements for temperatures and weights are all in imperial measurements, with Fahrenheit and Pounds. There is no way to change this. Pressure is not even in inches, but in feet. Hectopascals would be more appropriate here. Visibility should be in terms of kilometers and wind speed should be in KM/H. At least they got humidity and direction correct.

Looking at the figures, apparently the solar has generated 97.4 MWh in the lifetime, and saved 398,583.90 lb of CO2, 162.50 lb of NOx and 38.00 lb of SO2. This translates to 180795 Kg, 73.71 Kg and 17.2365 Kg respectively. Since the figures are split between CO2, NOx and SO2, I will combine them. NOx has a multiplier of 265, meaning one kG of NOx is equivalent to 265 kG of CO2 [REF]. I could not find a figure for SOx, so I am assuming that it is combined with water causing other environmental issues before getting into the atmosphere. The NOx figure becomes about 19,533 kG

Doing the math, dividing the CO2 by the Energy (180,795 kG / 97,400 kWh) we get a figure of 1.856 kG CO2-e / kWh. Adding in the NOx figure this becomes 2.056 kG CO2-e / kWh.

The issue with this is that this figure is incorrect. Looking at the National Greenhouse Accounts Factors (Link), the figures for NSW are about 1.06 kG CO2-e / kWh, or about half of the stated figure. Even using the Victorian figures of about 1.35 kG CO2-e / kWh, things are still quite incorrect.

Looking at the other figures, the page assumes that the TV is consuming about 150W – Amazingly this is about correct. The figure for the PC’s may not be so correct. This assumes that a PC consumes 130 kWh of energy per year. This depends on the PC, but in an office environment the savings in terms of number of PC’s are significantly overrated.

As for the Carbon Offset in metric tons, this is simply a conversion of the CO2 in pounds into metric.

From the same portal comes the following screen dumps:

Notice how energy starting to be produced just before 5AM. Well, this is a problem, since according to the almanac, first light is not until 5:46AM, and sunrise is not until 6:13am! Therefore, according to the portal, the solar system is generating in the pitch black for about an hour, and then generating energy pre-dawn for another 30 minutes. We do not have the data yet, bit it is a fair assumption that the timezone data is incorrect. Given that the timezone is entered as a zone, I suspect that their timezone database is actually wrong.