One kilowatt of solar energy equals 1,000 watts of electricity.
One kilowatt hour generated by solar energy equates to the total amount of usable electricity needed to provide power for a 100 watt bulb burning for about 10 hours.
Cities like Los Angeles, California get about 5.5 hours of sunlight on a daily bases every year.
A location which is cloudy for example Hamburg, Germany, still gets about 2.5 hours of sunlight, more than enough to produce sufficient amounts of solar energy.
In a sunny location and climate, a one kilowatt solar system efficiently produces around 1,600 kilowatts hours each year. And in a particularly cloudy environment, one kilowatt generates about 750 kilowatt hours per year.
An efficient solar energy PV or thermal system can generate usable and sustainable energy for 24 hours each day if you combine solar electric modules with batteries to store some of the energy to use at night.
Solar energy systems are designed to even produce solar energy when sunlight is blocked by a cloudy formation. Depending on the technology it will create about 10 to 20% of the energy it creates on normal sunny days.
At night you will have to depend on your backup storage for energy, which is the only shortcoming of solar technology. That is because hey, the sun doesn’t shine all the time; but still, the technology has gotten considerably popular. U.S., Japan, Germany now house some of the biggest markets for solar energy technology.