Looks expensive. The grey ones are the broken ones.
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I feel like this is one of those things that definitely has to have happened before now; after all, grid-scale solar isn’t something we’ve just started doing in the last two or three years, we’ve been at it for at least 15 that I know of. And hail isn’t exactly a new phenomenon in TX. So I wonder why we’re hearing about it like it’s news. Is this fossil fuel funded bad press? Did they skimp on protection they shouldn’t have?
It’s Texas. So without doing any research, it’s *probably all of the above and also there’s corruption in there somewhere…
Idk, here in the PNW I had only seen hail once in the past 10 years, this spring it has hailed over a dozen times… climate change is wild
Ah, the solar power epicenter that is the PNW.
I meant that yes hail happens in Texas, but these freak storms are getting worse and it is a new phenomenon. Also most houses around here have solar
Actually, I guess I was trying to be funny. And me having 25kW of solar panels is even crazier, because I’m an afternoon’s drive away from the Arctic Circle. In winter, we get about 6 hours of sunlight a day, at a ridiculously terrible angle.
Solar farms on rust scale are relatively new, though. So this might have happened countless times before, but not that concentrated on a single entity.
My 200W panel just got slammed camping over xmas and not a spot of damage on it—its made to have some sort of protection from hail strikes. Meanwhile the 4×4 got smashed windows and dents all over.
Wow that’s a huge hail ball! I get excited when they’re marble-sized.
Placing hardware cloth or similar over the panels with a couple inches of stand-off should prevent most any damage from even lege hail. It will probably reduce sunlight by a few percent across the entire field, but considering the storms Texas gets it would likely be worth it in the long run instead of having most of an entire farm wrecked.
But then Texas isn’t big on protecting their power sources from environmental impacts, are they.
Nah, how else will Republicans cry that solar energy is bad, and that we need coal and oil?
How strong that cloth and attachment would need to be to survive gusts from a storm that’s capable of generating such big hail?
Hardware cloth is metal mesh, so any wind strong enough to remove it would have long since destroyed the panel it was attached to thanks to the surface area of the panel. The standoffs would probably need to be “L” tabs or similar arranged in a grid across the face of the panel. Heck, just erecting a screen over the entire field would probably be better and cheaper than doing individual panels, but a field-size cover would probably end up with needing higher strength posts to mount it because of the greater drag over surface area. That said, I’m not an engineer, so the most efficient and effective method of protection is going to have to come from someone with more knowledge than my guesswork.
Wow. It was only after reading comments on this post until that I remembered WHY I was more than happy to leave Reddit behind. Too bad so many of these diseased children moved over here.
It took just one comment: ’ What is “4000ac”? ’ to start the drool-fest.
Better find a new place then.
All the people arguing for nuclear, are you sure Texas is best place to handle that? I’m fine with nuclear as long as they have a reasonable plan to store the waste, but Texas is horrible at managing anything energy related.
Yeah. I’m not normally an anprim, but for Texas…
You know what the plan to store a lot of nuclear waste in America is? Bury it in west nowhere, Texas.
Tbh, I think America in general might be a little too obsessed with personal freedom for us to transfer the entire country over to nuclear energy.
Successful nuclear programs require actual collective work for long term viability. We would need to actually give administrative powers to an agency like the nuclear regulation commission that supercedes the authority of individual states.
Otherwise its just going to be like 30 years of ironing out NIMBY state legislation before anything gets built, just like the deep storage facility we’ve been “building” since the 80s.
Don’t tread on my private infrastructure!!
I think even when damaged they still produce.
More modern vertical arrays might fair better in hurricane-prone areas.
Heliostats seem to be getting popular on large solar farms. You could use them to stow the panels upright to avoid damage in these circumstances.
sucks to be the insurance in this case
I wondered if this was the one from years ago, or new.
Looked expensive. Looks like garbage now.
