Talk:Solar Panel/@comment-5843524-20190116055007

For overnight (277 seconds out of the 1200 seconds for each day, 23% of the day) there is no charge at all. For the last and first 10 seconds of light on each day there is very little power (less than 2 energy from a Solar Panel at sea-level), so the effective night length is 296 seconds during which you are only running on the stored power from within the Solar Panel, so the maximum sustainable power for each Solar Panel is 75/(296/60)=15.2 energy per minute. This is sustainable down to about 110 meters below sea-level.

So effectively you can treat each Solar Panel as another 15.2 energy per minute (vs Bioreactor is 50 energy per minute, Nuclear Reactor is 250 energy per minute, and Thermal Plant is up to 104 energy per minute).

Compare that to your power draws: Water Filtration Machine which tries to use 51 energy per minute all the time by itself and Floodlight/Spotlight which use 60 energy per minute each, plus any power cell/battery chargers and replicators you want to run.