Solar panels do approximately nothing at night. Short answer: output falls to zero watts, the inverter drops into a 1-5 W standby mode, and even a full moon's 0.001-0.0025 W/m2 of light (versus 1,000 W/m2 at midday) coaxes only about a thousandth of a watt from a 400 W panel. So what's actually happening on your roof between dusk and dawn? The inverter idles, the meter still spins, and if you've got batteries, they're working overtime. For more on whether solar panels work after dark, the physics and battery math are the same.
Monitoring apps plot production as a line that drops to zero after sunset and stays there for eight hours or more, and new owners often read that flat stretch as a fault. It's the normal curve: every silicon panel ever made sits there doing nothing after dark, and knowing what the nighttime curve should look like is the quickest way to spot a real problem.
What Actually Happens to Solar Panels in the Dark?
Standard silicon panels generate close to zero watts at night because the photovoltaic effect needs photon energy above silicon's 1.12 eV bandgap (NREL). Full moonlight delivers roughly 0.001-0.0025 W/m2 versus the 1,000 W/m2 STC reference (sunlight is 400,000 to 1,000,000 times brighter), so output drops about 6 orders of magnitude. A 400W panel under a clear full moon produces around a thousandth of a watt, enough to register a tiny voltage on a sensitive multimeter but far below the DC input any inverter needs to start converting power. The panel is still a working semiconductor diode; it just isn't lit.
Panel temperature drops fast. Without sunlight, panels cool to ambient (or slightly below, through radiative cooling to the night sky) within an hour of sunset. Cold cells produce slightly more output per photon than warm ones (the -0.30%/deg C coefficient of TOPCon), which is why dawn brings a small efficiency bump before panels heat up. None of it matters at zero light. Homeowners watching real-time monitoring see the curve flat-line at sunset and worry something broke. The flat line is the system working exactly as designed.
What Does the Inverter Do at Night?
The inverter drops into low-power standby. Grid-tied inverters monitor DC string voltage continuously, and when it falls below the startup threshold (typically 60-150 V DC), the inverter disengages from power conversion while staying alert enough to detect sunrise. Standby draw runs 1-5 W, pulled from the AC grid, not the panels. Over 12 nighttime hours that's 12-60 Wh a day of vampire load, 4-22 kWh a year, under 1% of annual production. Not worth worrying about. Modern firmware keeps the monitoring electronics live to log data and hold the cloud connection, which is why your Enphase Envoy or SolarEdge gateway still shows "online" at 2 AM.
Microinverters differ slightly. Each one (Enphase IQ8A, IQ8M) drops to standby when its own panel falls below threshold and wakes one by one at dawn, while a string inverter drops the whole system at once. Hybrid inverters with battery support stay active continuously, managing battery discharge and monitoring grid voltage. The SolarEdge Home Battery 10 kWh and Tesla Powerwall 3 both handle this transition automatically.
How Do Grid-Tied Homes Get Power Overnight?
Grid-tied homes without batteries pull from the utility for everything after sunset. The meter spins forward when the utility supplies power and backward (or accrues credit) when solar exports surplus during the day, switching automatically as production rises and falls.
The math: the average US home consumes 28-30 kWh per day (EIA, 2022), and assuming about half of that falls between 6 PM and 6 AM, roughly 14-15 kWh of grid draw per night. At about $0.18/kWh (EIA's July 2026 national residential average was 18.31 cents), that's roughly $2.60-$2.75 per night.
Net metering offsets that draw across the billing cycle. In states with full retail net metering (much of New York, Massachusetts, parts of the Midwest), 1 kWh exported at noon offsets 1 kWh imported at midnight, so the grid acts as a free seasonal battery. California's net billing tariff (NEM 3.0) changed that for applications filed on or after April 15, 2023 (CPUC): exports are credited at an hourly avoided-cost value, and installer guides put typical credits near $0.05-0.08/kWh versus $0.30 or more under NEM 2.0, a cut of roughly 75%. Retail power there averaged 33.6 cents in July 2026 (EIA), so homeowners installing under the new tariff often add batteries to self-consume rather than export at low rates.
How Do Batteries Cycle Through the Night?
Battery systems run an automated charge-discharge cycle anchored to sunset. Surplus daytime production charges the battery; as production drops below consumption (typically late afternoon), the battery discharges to cover loads until it hits minimum reserve (usually 10-20%) or sunrise restarts generation. A typical evening ramps from 1-2 kW discharge at 5 PM to a 2-4 kW peak load (cooking, lights, TV) at 7-9 PM, then tapers to 0.5-1 kW by midnight and 0.3-0.5 kW (fridge cycling, standby) by 3 AM.
A 13.5 kWh Tesla Powerwall 3 covers a full overnight load for most US households if the day charged it fully. Two Powerwalls (27 kWh) buy multi-day resilience. Our off-grid solar system packages guide covers configurations from 15 to 60 kWh.
What if the battery runs out at 3 AM? Grid-tied hybrid systems draw from the utility automatically once the battery hits minimum state of charge. Off-grid systems run a backup generator or have a power gap until sunrise. Hybrid is by far the most common residential setup because it sidesteps the worst case.
The honest answer to "what do solar panels do at night?" is: nothing. The inverter, the grid, and your battery do all the work while the panels sit in the dark.
Why Do Some People Think Solar Panels Generate Power at Night?
Three persistent misconceptions:
Streetlight or moonlight production. Both fall well below the inverter wake threshold. A panel under a sodium streetlamp registers microvolts at best, and the arithmetic for moonlight (0.001-0.0025 W/m2) rules out anything an inverter could convert. A grid-tied system needs real DC input before it starts, which is why it never wakes for either.
Thermal panels that work at night. A Stanford team reported in 2022 that a radiative-cooling device paired with a thermoelectric generator produced over 100 mW/m2 at night from the temperature gap between a warm surface and the cold sky (iScience, 2022), about 2,000 times less than daytime silicon. Interesting science, commercially nonexistent in 2026; our guide to overnight battery architectures covers what actually carries a home through the dark.
"Solar panels that work in the dark" marketing. These usually trace back to radiative-cooling or thermoradiative research, or to systems where a battery does the work. Ask the seller: what's the rated output at midnight, and where's the third-party test data?
What Does Nighttime Behavior Look Like in Real Monitoring Apps?
A typical monitoring screen shows zero production overnight, with a fast ramp at sunrise and a slow taper at sunset. Inverters often produce trace power (1-10W) for 15-30 minutes after sunrise and before sunset, the bottom of the curve where panel voltage is barely above threshold.
| Time | Solar production | Inverter status | Grid flow (no battery) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 PM (sunset) | 200-500 W | Active, dropping | Slight import |
| 7 PM | 0 W | Standby | Full import |
| 10 PM | 0 W | Standby | ~1 kW import |
| 3 AM | 0 W | Standby | ~0.5 kW import |
| 6 AM | 50-150 W | Active, climbing | Slight import |
| 8 AM | 800-1500 W | Active, climbing | Export starts |
What if the app shows a few watts overnight? Treat it as measurement noise, or as a battery or grid flow mislabeled as production, because real PV output at night is zero. A tiny reading from ambient light on the panels would average out to nothing across hourly bins, and nothing is exported anywhere.
For how cloudy conditions and seasonal variability shape output, see our guide to raising solar PV yield.
Summary
Solar panels do nothing useful at night. The inverter sits in standby pulling a few watts from the grid. Without batteries, every appliance runs on grid electricity from sunset to sunrise; with batteries, storage covers the evening load and falls back to the grid at minimum charge. A typical US household uses roughly 14-15 kWh overnight, if about half its daily load falls after dark. Net metering offsets that draw in many states, though California's NEM 3.0 cut export credits sharply for applications from April 2023, pushing battery economics to the front. Real PV doesn't generate after dark, and products claiming otherwise are misrepresenting research or leaning on storage.