By Jo Nova
Hail destroyed most of the three year old Scottsbluff community solar project in Nebraska this week. Solar energy might be free but collecting it requires vast acreages of fragile and expensive infrastructure.
Imagine if a three year old coal plant was “destroyed by hail?”
Scottscliffe was a 5.2MW plant with 14,000 panels that started operating in the Spring of 2020. In theory it was going to reduce the “carbon footprint and stabilize city costs for the next 25 years”. Instead it will increase the toxic metal in landfill.
There were tornadoes in the area at the time, but there doesn’t appear to be damage to the fences, trees or poles surrounding the plant.
About a quarter of the panels may have survived, or at least don’t have damage visible from 100 meters away…
We hope they had insurance.
Baseball-sized hail took out a 5.2-megawatt solar farm in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, on Friday
Kevin Killough, Cowboy State Daily
[Don Day, Cowboy State Daily meteorologist] said that the region around southeast Wyoming has some of the highest frequencies of hailstorms in the country. “It’s ground zero,” Day said.
The average is seven to nine hailstorms per year. That includes everything from pea-sized to baseball-sized hail. “Scottsbluff last Friday night was just absolutely pummeled,” Day said.
Day said that the storms are covering a sparsely populated area with little development, so they don’t always cause a lot of damage. As more solar farms are built, he said there will likely be more shattered panels.
Sometimes the places with the most sun also have the most hailstones…
Thanks to Bill in AZ for the tip, and Matt Larsen for the photo.
it’s just a little nick. a bit of tape and it will be fine
221
Remember the idea to put shadecloth over the Great Barrier Reef to protect it from bleaching? They might have some over to protect solar panels as well.
260
No, I don’t remember, but I do remember James Lovelock’s plan to spread aerosols via jets to reflect the sun and turn the sky a gray colour. Very scientific.
60
The UN is talking about it again!
40
Well I’ve got a few cans at the back of the store needing used -will that help? 😉 but better still is a box of matches, surely? Look at the results over Canada – affecting the N Hemi-sphere ( they say) – since I haven’t noticed anything up here – a hotter June with Colder Nights, and only NOW a few short heavy showers.
10
Earth got there first. In 1815 Mount Tambora ejected so much dust into the upper atmosphere is circled the earth for two years, blotting out the sun, causing the ‘year without summer’ when crops failed and famine stalked. Come to think of it, that is right up Gates’s street. Most would take it as a warning not to meddle but Gates thinks it’s a blueprint.
30
” . . . So, can it be a coincidence that the most
54:17 cataclysmic eruption of Hekla we know about was the one that took place
54:21 sometime around the Year 1100 BC, right as the Bronze Age collapse reached its
54:27 height? This eruption is known as Hekla 3. It threw nearly seven-and-a-half
54:34 cubic kilometers of volcanic rock into the atmosphere and covered the sky in a
54:39 dark shroud of dust that would have lasted for years after the event. In
54:43 Ireland, studies done on bog oaks, those are trees half-fossilized in marshy
54:49 waters, have shown that for 18 years after the eruption of Hekla 3, the trees
54:53 barely grew at all. Across the Atlantic in the United States,
54:58 Bristlecone Pines, the oldest living trees on earth, still show similar
55:03 records of this time of darkness and cooling which seems to have lasted about
55:07 two decades. The effect on our region would have been dramatic; crops
55:13 would have failed, soils would have blown away, and more than that; the dark cloud that
55:19 seemed to hang over the sun would have spoken to people of something dreadful
55:23 on its way, a punishment from the gods and perhaps even the end of the world. . . . ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B965f8AcNbw
20
An umbrella over each solar panel!
20
Gaffer tape fixes everything Tony! 🙂
110
As those of us that use(d) it professionally and always have rolls of the stuff handy, joke:
“Why is Gaffa Tape like “the Force”?
It has a light side and a dark side and it holds the universe together”.
“Gaffa”: From the word “Gaffer”, a “lighting / electrical” assistant who uses it to secure cables to various surfaces and who traditionally uised a “gaff” (pole with a hooked end) to adjust theatrical lamps for alignment, focus, etc., as instructed by the “lighting cameraman’ also known as the “director of photography” .
“Duct Tape” is a different beast, despite being about the same width, because it is not as tenaciously “adhesive, nor robust, being, as the name suggests, used to seal small gaps in air ducting. Then, there is “book-binding” tape, another, different cloth-reinforced adhesive tape that generally a LOT cheaper than “the good stuff”, like Nashua or “US Gaffer” brand gaffer tape.
REAL gaffer tape on clothing, footwear, cars, luggage, etc. usually identifies the owner as someone in, or close to, “show-biz”.
Also sometimes called “100 mile an hour” tape, based on its use in WW2 to hold Perspex canopy panels in place on military aircraft. OK on unpressurized types; Large pressurized bombers at 30 thousand feet? Not so much; Boeing had to devise a special mounting system for aircraft like the B-29.
20
You sound like Chris Bowen.
100
no need to be insulting 🙂
20
For non-Au folk Bowen is the MP with an economics degree who does not understand his current portfolio. Like many in Parliament he thinks we can replace power stations with batteries and run Au on wind and solar.
80
Psst….wanna buy shares in the Sun Cable Project? No risk…..oops!
100
5 MW is puny in the grand scheme of things. Townsville has about 800 MW installed capacity around it, but we DID get a hailstorm here in ’68 but those stones would have been survivable. I remember my servo driveway suddenly getting busy as cars parked under my awning. 🙂
40
I once picked up a very battered hire car from an airport in Italy. I asked why it was in such a state and was told they had a terrific hailstorm a week earlier and this damage was the result, on a car only 2 months old. Apparently it was not unusual and they would expect a damaging event every 2 or 3 years. On the positive side, It meant that any damage I might accidentally do would not be noticed-much better than getting a pristine hire car.
Here in the UK crops being destroyed in their fields by hail might happen in random locations once a year, so pot luck if your solar farm might be destroyed in a 20 year life span..
260
There was a case next door to me in the UK about 12 years ago, where a 15 minute hailstorm knocked three-quarters of the yield out of a crop of oilseeds the day before it was due to be harvested. The loss on the 20 acre field was of the order of £6000.
120
My apple trees got macerated by hail spring last year, just before the new leaves had hardened up and after the fruits had just set. Surprisingly I still managed to harvest more than I could eat although most had damaged skins/flesh to some extent. Nature is annoying sometimes.
100
Many years ago the company I was working for was hit by tennis-ball-sized hail that destroyed most of the worker’s cars. The hail just punched straight through their windscreens and rear windows, leaving fist-sized holes. And the entire bodywork was ruined. For reason, decided to go home early and this missed the damage.
70
In 2009, a hailstorm in NW Sydney seriously damaged 8 cars in my property…5 of them mine,..3 of them were “insurance write offs” ! ( one was only 24 hrs out of the dealer showroom.
Probably $100k+ damage to cars, and thats without house repairs etc.
Every year the car dealers have “Hail sale” specials .
60
My regular shopping trolley car is a hail damaged insurance company statuary write off, bought at auction for about 20% of it’s undamaged value. Almost every panel has some minor pits. They don’t worry me, but would be most upsetting if the thing was your pride & joy.
The family had a small orchard in Young NSW in the 1950s. Fortunately we were surrounded by large cherry orchards. They would all fire off hail rockets whenever big black clouds approached, the type that might produce hail. One hail storm meant virtually no income for another year.
I don’t know how effective the rockets were, but we never suffered hail damage. Perhaps solar farmers aren’t as smart as cherry farmers.
60
A mate of mine bought a hail damaged XJ40 Jag. He is the reverse of me, I don’t mind mechanical but hate bodywork, he quite like likes body work and expects the rest to just work. He made it look beautiful (if you like Jags I guess)
20
I remember seeing the effect of this storm when visiting Sydney. The suburb that we drove through had every second house with tarps across the roof as they waited their turn for the over-worked tilers to fix the damage. If hail can smash a tile roof it can certainly smash a solar panel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Sydney_hailstorm
40
Did they make you fill out the little sheet with a picture of a car marking down any blemishes you could see before driving it away? (I imagine that would take a while.)
30
No, they basically admitted it was a wreck already. I dread to think the reaction though if the hailstorm had occurred once I was legally responsible for the vehicle.
10
I once picked up a hire car in Salerno, Italy to tour around the Almafi Coast and Pompei (we walked that bit). Every panel except the roof was battered even though it was offered by a world-known hire company. We soon found out the reason for pinged panels was the result of narrow winding roads carrying buses, trucks and many “pinch” points.
20
Several years ago as was driving home and not far from my entrance driveway hail began to fall and I had no time to open the shed and park the vehicle, so I parked as close as possible under a Jacaranda tree close to the trunk. After several minutes the hail storm passed, my vehicle looked like it had been pulled out of a swamp covered with shredded leaves.
It had one small dent on the leading edge of the engine cover.
20
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/06/28/britain-to-be-left-without-emergency-coal-reserves-this-winter/
Hail stones are the least of your problems when you have idiots running the country.
511
And we have them here in Oz Mwhite
180
Maybe they make more money dismantling the power stations and shipping them to China or India, or even Africa.. anywhere except the West.
60
Drax has six boilers.
Four burn forests.
Two burn coal.
Why don’t they just cut down more forests in the US and ship them across the Atlantic to burn instead of coal in the two coal units?
/sarc.
121
That should read “ruining the country” 😉
100
Very recently we had a hail storm in NovoCastria which was a “big one”.
One of our neighbours has a solar installation that appeared to have survived but was eventually replaced.
The supporting old tile roof was replaced with brand new corrugated iron.
A very expensive roof repair.
200
Years ago now parts of the Brisbane suburb of Clontarf suffered a hail storm with stones so big & heavy they flattened some of the corrugations in corrugation iron roofs. The extension of the width of the sheets pulled many of the nails out of the roof.
Fortunately there was little wind with the hail, or many would have lost their roofs.
60
My Queensland home had a corrugated old galvanised steel heavy gauge roof (0.77mm from memory) and a hail storm followed by very high wind speed, there were many dents but worst of all the side of the roof facing prevailing wind was pushed in, the timber supports moved and from the street the roof looked very strange.
We were able to use hydraulic jacks to push it back into position and secure it.
10
Must have been something to live through. We had bad hail (golf to tennis ball size) in a iron roofed house and the impact noise was quite alarming. You wonder how big they will be when they start to come whistling through the roof.
10
Hail to Mother Nature (as in ‘Hail Caesar’). Long may this continue. ‘Ruinables’ no less.
170
Or as the Roman gladiators would say:
Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant.
(Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you.)
60
Shouldn’t the panels have been of a design that was able to tolerate expected weather conditions?
And if such resistant panels don’t exist, why install panels likely to be damaged in the expected weather?
Some domestic users cover their panels when hail storms are predicted.
Let’s face facts. Solar and wind are fragile, short-lived, semi-disposable technologies, not to mention expensive and useless.
It’s good in the above-mentioned case that the 5MW parasitic load has been removed from the grid.
300
The panels are on motorised trackers, so surely they could have been turned downwards as much as possible. There are 14,000 panels, so will keep a team busy for a while.
150
I don’t understand wby anyone should have checked whether hail damage was likely. With the subsidy safely banked, who cares about hail …..
….. on reflection, hail-prone areas are actually the best, because hail could bring forward the next subsidy.
20
Check the reports from the early stages of the proposal. Locals and “experts” likely said storms with hail could be expected.
Check the map here:
https://lincolnweather.unl.edu/maps-nebraska-density-tornadoes
The yellow county on the west edge is the location of Scottsbluff. Severe weather, the type that generates tornadoes, frequently causes large hail. I lived in Iowa – next state east – for 7 years and had an old rag-top Ford out in such a storm. Duct tape to the rescue. 🙂
120
Of course we must realize, to them, this proves the existential necessity to build more solar farms.
180
An expensive lesson in reality for the climate clowns. But…Blackout Bowen would build more solar installations to avoid this.
170
Such a storm also voids the warranty on windmills. Even though such storms are a natural part of the environmental expectation when purchasing, especially for the Midwest. The differential windloading even when the blades are feathered is enough to do damage. And of course damage to the blades would produce permanent imbalances.
The summer/winter temperature variation of -40C to +40C must be a real threat for what is, on average, a temperate zone. And dramatically shortens life expectancy. Also likely not claimable given the environment is a customer choice and installation in ‘Tornado Alley’ would likely void the warranty. It’s all pretty obvious for outside installations.
What is also true is that a gas or diesel or coal or oil or wood or hydro or nuclear plant would suffer no damage. And would not be shut down for too much wind or not enough or too much sun or zero.
So we can now label unreliables as fragile. And operationally limited by common weather conditions. Zero wind, too much wind, no sun, storms, hail, lightning. And you would also have to add to the cost the loss of substantial areas of valuable farmland.
That’s not what anyone would call free reliable energy.
340
Ice throw from wind turbines is also a potentially deadly hazard.
https://stopthesethings.com/2018/02/22/deadly-cool-wind-turbine-throws-ice-chunks-into-us-college/
130
The common warranty
– Solar panel performance : 25 years
– Solar panel product : 5 years
– Inverter : 5 years
– Installation : Typically 1 or 2 years
Performance is also called a ‘manufacturer’s warranty’. If you can locate the manufacturer in China.
So expect a 5 year warranty on what is just another caveat emptor consumer product like a motor car but without spare parts or labour.
A few big-ticket items are not typically covered by most solar warranties:
Not covered
– a specific amount of solar production from your system
– cost of labor to diagnose and replace equipment, or the shipping costs to get replacements on site
– Damage to solar panels due to power failure or surges, fire, flood, direct or indirect lightning strikes, or other acts of nature
Plus the usual. That’s an old model. Out of stock. Company out of business.
And don’t forget that at present these things are typically 50% subsidized by hidden taxes on your fossil fuel electricity, so the more people put in solar, the less subsidy there will be. And the cost of replacement will be double.
250
And say the average practical life expectancy was 5 years against a factory like power plant which is 50 years, you have to multiply the cost of unreliables x 10. And multiply the output by the capacity factor, about 0.3.
So viewed as the short term consumer products they are the cost of this form of free energy is 30x higher than Name Plate. And coal, gas, oil, petrol, wood are free solar too. Unreliables are no longer an investment and more than a car or washing machine or mobile phone is an investment.
190
TdeF
Re “So we can now label unreliables as fragile. And operationally limited by common weather conditions. ”
You’re more “ecologically correct” there than you may realise.
You’ve heard of “ecologically fragile ecosystems”?
But the “fragile” in that has nothing to do with comparison to , say the likes of Wedgewood fine porcelain.
It means that ecosystem has a history of big changes in plant species composition. Which sounds just the ticket for the likes of semi-arid and arid ecosystems subject to varied climatic influences but I digress.
So, yes, the “ephemeral energies” rate as “fragile”
130
Safe and effective.
Fragile and limited.
I love it …
80
I’ve never heard of a coal, gas, nuclear or hydro power station being destroyed by hail or nearly any other weather event.
Note: There is propaganda put out by Regressives to try and claim power stations (I.e. coal, gas, nuclear, hydro) are susceptible to weather. Probably in response to facts stated by conservatives and fellow rational thinkers about the weather susceptibility of wind and solar installations. See https://phys.org/news/2020-01-climate-related-weather-conditions-disrupt-power.html but their claims are mostly nonsense or relate to susceptibility of power lines that might be brought down by adverse weather, not realistic threats to power stations themselves. Strangely, the summary of the linked report doesn’t mention the extreme weather susceptibility of wind and solar subsidy farms although the actual report does, but seems to downplay it.
Note 2: I never refer to solar or wind subsidy harvesting installations as “power stations”. This term I use for coal, gas, nuclear and real hydro (not SH2) generation
Note 3: In the link, note the standard alarmist scary picture taken of a power station during atmospheric conditions leading to moisture condensation coming out of the cooling towers. The ignorant classes, which is just about everyone, think this is “carbon pollution” (sic).
311
I guess I am wondering why so many of the panels seem to have dozens of catastrophically damaging hits while the panel(s) on either side have no apparent damage. Sometimes there are several undamaged looking panels in a row. I suppose that once a hail stone breaks the glass of a panel, the remaining glass on the panel would be much weaker and show more damage while the undamaged panels did not receive a hit hard enough to break the glass and successfully resisted all the hail stones hitting it.
Or, it could be that the damaged panels had glass made by Chang’s cheap and dirty glass works while the undamaged panels had glass made by Wong’s excellent glass factory providing higher-quality glass at surprisingly low prices (but not the lowest, however).
When ordering glass for your panels or just ordering completed panels as a DIY homeowner or a solar installer, how does one know where the glass comes from and what quality it is? Or the cells?
Then there is this: I have personally seen “hot spots” in solar panels at night on high-end thermographic cameras pointed at expensive houses as part of a pre-sale home inspection evaluation. My friend (the certified home inspector) and I (borrower of the camera from work) were just looking at house exteriors and roofs at night for heat leakage out of the house. He was trying to see if buying a thermal camera (expensive in those days) and what level of camera performance would ne necessary to add a special (and lucrative) service to his business.
So, we were out driving around pointing the camera at houses and looking at the display one night. The very first solar panel array on a house we came across had a large number of hot spots. Some were the size of a single cell in the panel, some were several cells in a row or scattered around the panel – likely cells cut from the same defective wafer or just defective slices and processing if it was made from cell-size wafers. We were not expecting to see anything like this and spent quite a bit of time wondering about what was going on.
We did some checking with and showing of the thermographs to solar installers, solar company owners, and some friends I had at work who had worked in the raw silicon wafers for sale business of my company. We found that there can be manufacturing defects in the cells, assembly defects in the panels, and degradation of the cells and panels as they age or get wet. A poorly designed or malfunctioning system can let voltage from the grid or battery storage flow backward into the cell array. Normally, this is not a problem. But when there are defects in the cells or panel, this power flows through what should be reverse biased junctions in the cell(s), creating heat in the cell.
Now, in today’s thinking, this is not all bad. When power flows backward through bad cells at night, it creates heat in the cell, which is then radiated off the planet into the cold night sky. This cools the Earth ever so slightly, staving off the coming climate apocalypse, and making the homeowner atone for his sin of watching TV in a comfortable room at night through additional revolutions of his electric meter to make up for the power radiated off into space.
Kinda brings a little tear to my eye.
300
Interesting comments about thermal imaging drnano.
The stark contrast between damaged and undamaged panels might be due to which grade of Chinesium they were made of and which day of the week they were made on.
131
Bit like how random houses survive bushfires and cyclones. We like to think the attack is uniform but it isnt.
10
People do expect random to be uniform. But as I learned very early in a lecture, this is wrong. Uniform regularity or spacing is a clear indication that something is not random.
Random really means clustering. You get this in everything like the adage ‘good things come in threes’. It’s true. And a fascinating and non obvious observation. It is one of those times when you could kick yourself for not seeing it.
Consider events evenly spaced, say every three months. You would reasonably start to think they were not random and someone was planning them because they were predictable, not random. Now move every second event either way from the regular time line and voila, you have your clusters of three.
And for random spacing in 2D as across this area, you would expect some panels to be hammered and some to escape unscathed.
And you get this on a macro scale too. I remember a favorite vineyard Bannockburn near Geelong which was smashed by hail and the ones adjacent untouched. This is remarkably normal.
150
The next distribution which people expect to be a normal distribution is in talents and productive output, generally the 80/20 rule.
Jordan Petersen slowly realised this in human affairs, the Pareto distribution or Matthew distribution. And the result is startling.
Instead of things being average, this is incredibly skewed. When a few random talents and lucky random events have to come together to make a top performer, the factors multiply which is why you get a Leonardo or a Michael Jordan or a Diego Maradona or an Elon Musk or a Franz Liszt.
And it is why Communism and socialism impoverishes everyone. In stopping exceptional people from succeeding, you stop everyone from advancing which has been at the core of why Europe has been so successful and then the US but massive India and China not. Forced equality and equity devastate everyone.
At the heart of it is simple mathematics.
And the financial incentive plus the patent system where you get to own an idea for 20 years. Jeff Bezos’ One Click Buy patent set Amazon up. Patents and copyright and trademarks are not respected in other countries like China. So there is no reward system.
301
I think a mix of smashed and not smashed would be a random event if it was purely a binary situation as in one single hit (on average) per panel.
But there were presumably multiple hits (on average) per panel. This suggests the likelihood of each panel smashing was not random but determined by a different grade of Chinesium glass on each panel. Some glass was made to spec. and resistant, others were sub spec. and failed.
71
Another possibility is random size variation. Even clumping. Materials especially glass can be brittle. Very strong up to a point and the catastrophic collapse.
40
Glass can be as strong as steel, but when steel passes its elastic limit it deforms. Glass shatters. We saw it in the carbon fibre submersible. It was also true of cast iron, immensely strong. But in 1847 the bridge over the river Dee shattered, costing five lives and many injured. Amazingly it was the use of coal and thus coke which enabled ductile low carbon steels not rigid cast iron.
Coal was at the base of the Steel revolution which enabled the rapid industrial revolution. Now coal is to be banned. It’s a form of madness created by non scientists who want to reverse the Industrial revolution and drive Western democracies into poverty.
150
Re “I guess I am wondering why so many of the panels seem to have dozens of catastrophically damaging hits while the panel(s) on either side have no apparent damage. ”
Mother Nature’s aim was a bit off? Like holes in the pattern from a shotgun.
60
“aim was a bit off” you say?
Nothing beats your govt-sponsored public service evil-twin departments yesterday:
ABC: “The Bureau’s winter rain forecast from just a few weeks ago is thankfully off the mark.” [emphasis added]
Rejoice, o fools, we got it wrong! Again.
61
Solar Cells also emit infrared light when reverse powered at a wavelength of about 2500 nM. They are reversible like all semiconductor junctions designed to emit or absorb light, LEDs for instance will produce a voltage when illuminated by a shorter wavelength than their color. The thermal camera may have been sensitive to this wavelength. If so direct emission of photons over thermal emission would probably be the dominate effect.
The junctions in Solar Cells are actually forward biased in use. If there is no load the voltage rises to the point where all the current produced by the illuminating photons flows though the forward biased diode junction. As the load increases the voltage across the cell reduces and exponentially less current flows though internal junction. Solar panels controllers will try to optimize the current drawn to produce the best power output ie Voltage times Current. The optimum load voltage varies a little bit depending on the illumination and the temperature of the cells.
10
DrNano
A bit of info from a German company on Hot Spots.
There is a Thermo Camera photo in the link as well.
https://ae-solar.com/what-are-hot-spots-and-how-they-affect-solar-panels/
20
Thanks, I was not able to get my links to work.
The hot spot situation in sunlight (reduced power of the panel/array maybe leading to permanent damage to the cell or the panel) is different from hot spots during the night (comparatively gentle dissipation of power, and therefore, money).
10
I’d noticed this as well and figure that this is a characteristic of the typical glass structure of panels. It’s like one-hit fatigue; once there are fractures the size one can see there is no toughness against more. Many materials have little to no fatigue toughness once fractures reach a certain size — just instantaneous propagation over the entire body.
The estimate was that these hail stones were driven by high winds which is typical of really destructive storms. Note that this kind of weather should limit sensible placement of both solar and wind farms.
10
Woolooga Solar Farm west of Gympie has according to a neighbouring farmer experienced a similar event. The story is the insurers will not be underwriting any more risk for hail damage.
150
I wonder if any of those toxic components have leached into the soil. Won’t be much good for returning to farmland if it has.
90
They won’t need to return this good land to farmland because the Regressives are trying to shut down most agriculture, e.g. banning fertiliser, unreasonable restrictions on water usage, in Western Australia requiring permission of people who “identify” as indigenous to dig deeper than 50mm/2inches, promotion of insect eating, etc..
191
You know toxicity of solar panels must be a serious issue if even far Regressive Their ABC (Australia) reports on it. I was absolutely stunned to find this report that must have slipped through their woke censors.
170
Finally! Someone else noticed.
Roof-mounted solar panels and rainwater collection for human consumption, especially in hail / cyclone prone areas?
Cadmium (and other “stuff”) in your Cuppa?
Good luck.
20
Natural weather events are a pain in the butt and I’ve noticed very bad events from hail, frost, too much rain, droughts etc and over a very long period of time.
In about 1927 Red Cliffs Vic was nearly wiped out with frosts on the young vineyards and much suffering from the 1956 floods, then more severe hail + storm damage two years in a row in the mid 1970s.
During that 1970s hail damage to some car yards and caravan yards looked like some mad loonies had attacked the cars with baseball bats.
Since then there has been other isolated hail damage but not as bad as the earlier years. And the years of lighting up frost pots are long gone and most growers who have vulnerable crops have installed wind machines to move the air to protect valuable crops.
Obviously VULNERABLE, TOXIC W & S are EXPENSIVE disasters and should be stopped ASAP and we should only use RELIABLE BASE-LOAD energy from today.
121
Was just wondering about how these arrays of solar panels are connected together electrically – in series or parallel or a mixture ?
40
The third approach is micro inverters for each panel. The most expensive option, but avoids the risk of a partial shading on a panel string shutting down the entire string. For home inverters, I believe three string inputs is the normal maximum.
40
You should look for information how solar cells work. I can not remember the actual numbers. Each cell has a very small volyage of about 0.37 volts and small current. Each panel has cells in series and parallel. 8 panels at 12 volt DC gives about 1.5 kW at maximum output. One can run the system on DC eg a computer runs on DC and one can get lighting and many motors to rin on DC. To supply the grid and houses which were designed for AC there needs to be an inverter and likely a transformer yo bring the voltage to 230V. A large problem with solar systems is getting a consistent frequency which should a steady 50 hz.
30
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. What I was looking for was how are these arrays of 1,000s of panels are connected. I understand the basic physics and electrics but I don’t know how these solar industries connect up their farms.
Thanks.
10
There is often faulty reasoning that ‘the sun is shining and the wind is blowing somewhere else’ that is used to justify solar/wind generation.
Regarding weather damage, the renewable lobby can use the excuse that ‘there is always somewhere else that the hail is not falling so, all good’
Idjits all
100
“Climate Crisis! Climate Crisis! Climate Crisis!”
“What should we do about it?”
“Solar panels as far as the eye can see!”
“What about hail storms?”
“Huh?!”
130
Just wondering what a good lightening strike would do to an array of panels.
We’ve seen what it does to the windmills. Not pretty & very expensive .
91
The Post-modernist ideology of the Regressives denies the existence of objective reality.
Therefore, if Regressives don’t think hail strikes on solar panels are a problem, then they won’t be.
101
If only insurance companies would take the same viewpoint and NOT payout on this type of damage.
What impact on insurance premiums has occurred due to solar panel damage? Yet another “community cost” (tax) that is never in the cost-benefit equations.
Bet their actuaries know but won’t say to protect the “company” narrative.
If only we could get a premium discount for NOT having solar panels – like you do for not driving your car.
20
More on that –
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/29/huge-nebraska-solar-park-completely-smashed-to-pieces-by-one-single-hailstorm/
70
And the comments
Including
“I just posted this the other day on another thread:
“What windmill/solar advocates never address is this:
When storms occur and take down power lines, the current electricity generating plants do not get damaged. It only takes a relatively short time to repair the power lines to get people their power back.
With windmills and solar as your sole electricity generators, when a storm takes those out, you cannot get power to the people for many months or even years.”
So fortunately this array is not the sole producer of electricity at this time. But if that ever happens, how long do you think it will take to get it back up and running so people can have power?”
100
I talked to a mate a few days ago who told me he cleans his solar panels on his roof about once every month if he has the time.
He claims that if you only clean them every few months or randomly they definitely cost you money.
Here’s an Aussie link for cleaning panels on your house and the reduction in efficiency if you don’t over months etc.
BTW my mate isn’t a believer in their loony, dangerous CC BS and fraud but he installed his panels over 10 years ago and got a fairly good deal.
I often wonder how often the panels are cleaned on the big solar farms and the cost and time involved?
https://www.energymatters.com.au/renewable-news/solar-panels-cleaning/
60
A large solar farm in Morocco regularly cleans its panels, using over 200,000 litres of water each time.
70
It was impossible to keep ours clean. Limited sunshine leaves mold and over hanging eucalypts drop oils. ( i didnt put them on btw, previous owners did, Im not that dumb. I took them off)
60
Why does the article recommend wearing a hard hat when cleaning a panel array on a roof? If you fall the hard hat will come off and do nothing. Maybe it’s to protect the wearer from hail, and/or bird poop!
40
Looks good in the photo- op. Just ask any politician.
40
Apparently some work wear shops now have an area of higher gloss work wear for politicians.
sarc.
Labor MPs choose solidarity and Chinese work boot thongs.
sarc
20
They obviously believed that after installing so many virtue signals, the weather would only be perfect in the future, without hail or storms.
70
It wasn’t that long ago Jo wrote about smashed panels in Sydney . Smashed panels , electrical shorts and potential fires . I’ve got panels and hail worries me …..
60
A kerfuffle in the need for all this “ephemeral energy” to beat the “CO2 Demon”
“The Verdict of Instrumental Methods”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/29/the-verdict-of-instrumental-methods/
60
But given the enormous amounts of mining/smelting/manufacturinjg and so CO2 required to make unreliables, with their lifetime do they ever end up saving any CO2 at all? It is looking like a fantasy, blowing up our coal power so China can use our coal to make windmills and solar panels to achieve nothing in CO2 savings.
With these lifetimes the CO2 savings from windmills and solar panels is likely NETT ZERO.
So why are we doing it? We are worse off in every measurable way.
40
A number of cars photos with hail damage at this link and I always try to get my car under a roof if hail is forecast in my area.
The last time about 12 months ago hail of about marble size was visible on the lawn, but I doubt it would’ve damaged my car and only lasted a minute or so.
https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/hail-car-damage
60
The loss of this 5MW power plant is such a great loss of generated power.
Why, across a whole year, this humungous plant would have delivered 7.67GWH of electrical energy.
Umm, you know, the same output from Bayswater coal fired power plant in, umm, two hours and forty five minutes.
Tony.
240
You’re confusing evil electricity with saintly electricity. There’s no comparison Tony.
80
Is the saintly electricity that green stuff I read about that consumers can pay a premium for supply?
30
They are the only electrons that can get through the patent filter at the ACT border.
20
I saw the photo yesterday and asked the question of how much actual power was generated.
5MW seems a lot for one person and enough for average power for 2,000 homes, a small town.
Except that it’s lunchtime solar especially in winter and you need the power at breakfast and dinner time and night when it’s not available. And in winter even at midday there can be no sun at all.
So without a central power grid, this is likely to be near useless and not cost effective at any time, especially if you are renting arable land. I would love to know if this system is now just demolished, which I suspect is its fate.
A lot of solar power systems of this size and bigger seem to be being quietly abandoned. And who is paying to clean up the mess? And the cost of disposal of all those panels made from dangerous chemicals? I suspect people just walk away, leaving the mess to another generation.
And finally that if these things were not subsidized by taxes on coal power, no one would build them. It’s devastating that the attraction is the saving in electricity costs except that the electricity would be half the cost without the hidden subsidies.
60
The primary purpose of these solar (and windmill) farms is to harvest subsidies. Whether they work or not is largely irrelevant.
40
I think I saw this photo and mentions on social media yesterday, at least a dozen times, by different contributors. But maybe that reflects the type of people I follow.
80
GREEN ENERGY
Electric Cars Are An Expensive Scam
BY: DAVID HARSANYI
JUNE 29, 2023
If EVs were really an innovation, the state wouldn’t have to bribe and force companies to produce them.
The left likes to treat skeptics of electrical cars as if they were Luddites. Truth is, making an existing product less efficient but more expensive doesn’t really meet the definition of innovation.
Even the purported amenities and technological advances EV-makers like to brag about in their ads have been a regular feature of gas-powered vehicles going back generations. At best, EVs, if they fulfill their promise, are a lateral technology.
Which is why there is no real “emerging market” for EVs in the United States as much as there’s an industrial policy in place that props up EVs with government purchases, propaganda, endless state subsidies, cronyism, taxpayer-backed loans, and edicts. The green “revolution” is an elite-driven, top-down technocratic project.
And it’s increasingly clear that the only reason giant rent-seeking carmakers are so heavily invested in EV development is that government is promising to artificially limit the production of gas-powered cars.
In March, Joe Biden signed an executive order to “set a target” for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be zero-emission.
California claims it is banning combustion engines in all new cars in about 10 years. So carmakers adopt business models to deal with these distorted incentives and contrived theoretical markets of the future.
In today’s real-world economy, though, Ford announced this week that it was firing at least 1,000 employees — many of them white-collar workers on the EV side. Ford projects it’s going to lose $3 billion on electric vehicles in 2023, bringing its EV losses to $5.1 billion over two years.
In 2021, Ford reportedly lost $34,000 on every EV it made. This year it was losing more than $58,000 on every EV. In a normal world, Ford would be dramatically scaling back EV production, not expanding it. Remember that next time we need to bail out Detroit.
Then again, we’re already bailing them out, I suppose.
Last week, the U.S. Energy Department lent Ford — again, a company that loses tens of thousands of dollars on every EV it sells — another $9.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for a South Korean battery project.
One imagines no sane bank would do it. The cost of EV batteries has gone up, not down, over the past few years.
Ford says these up-front losses are part of a “start-up mentality.” We’re still pretending EVs are a new idea rather than an inferior one. But scaremongering about climate and a misplaced romanticizing of “manufacturing” jobs have softened up the public for this kind of waste.
In the statist’s utopian vision, highly paid union members will be grabbing their lunchpails and biking over to the local solar panel factory or EV production line and toiling there for the common good.
In the real world, there is Lordstown. In 2019, after GM — which also loses money on every EV sold — shut down a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, then-President Donald Trump made a big deal of publicly pressuring the auto giant to rectify the situation. So CEO Mary Barra lent Lordstown Motors, a new EV outfit, $40 million to retrofit the plant. Ohio also gave the company another $60 million.
You may remember the widespread glowing coverage of Lordstown. After Joe Biden signed his “Buy American” executive order, promising to replace the entire U.S. federal fleet with EVs, Lordstown’s stock shot up.
By the start of this year, Lordstown had manufactured 31 vehicles total. Six had been sold to actual consumers.
(But to be fair, five would be recalled — following a recall of 19.) The stock was trading at barely a dollar. Tech-funding giant Foxconn was pulling its $170 million. And this week the company filed for bankruptcy.
Without massive state help, EVs are a niche market for rich virtue signalers. And, come to think of it, that’s sort of what they are now, even with the help.
A recent University of California at Berkeley study found that 90 percent of tax credits for electric cars go to people in the top income strata.
Most EVs are brought by high earners who like the look and feel of a Tesla. And that’s fine. I don’t want to stop anyone from owning the car they prefer. I just don’t want to help pay for it.
Really, why would a middle-class family shun a perfectly good gas-powered car that can be fueled (most of the time) cheaply and driven virtually any distance, in any environment, and any time of the year? We don’t need lithium. We have the most efficient, affordable, portable, and useful form of energy. We have centuries’ worth of it waiting in the ground.
Climate alarmists might believe EVs are necessary to save the planet. That’s fine. Using their standard, however, a bike is an innovation. Because even on their terms, the usefulness of EVs is highly debatable.
Most of the energy that powers them is derived from fossil fuels. The manufacturing of an EV has a negligible positive benefit for the environment, if any.
And the fact is that if EVs were more efficient and saved us money, as enviros and politicians claim, consumers wouldn’t have to be compelled into using them and companies wouldn’t have to be bribed into producing them.
150
But the hail is because of climate change.
40
I see you are onto what is going on here Philip…if they install enough solar panels, no more hail storms as we make our climate utopia using renewables.
20
Going to be more of this sort of carnage.
New Jersey Cites Ukraine War to Push Huge Tax Break for Foreign Offshore Wind Company (28 Jun)
The problem with these projects is that hurricanes regularly strike even as far north as New Jersey. When Hurricane Maria went through Puerto Rico in 2017 both the wind turbines and the solar panels looked very very sad afterwards.
60
Wow, that is some serious damage. I presumed the glass was shock proof by design, or something like that. Never assume anything.
50
Being located in Nebraska, this power source would be shut down for several months because of snow.
50
…improving the cost and efficiency of power generation in Nebraska.
40
“Solar energy might be free but collecting it requires vast acreages of fragile and expensive infrastructure.” Some more activist baloney – why does the price of energy keep going up then, while the reliability of said energy keep going south?
40
warming causes cooling
free energy is expensive
2+2=5
60
The Australian standard (IEC 61215) is for 25mm @ 80km/h hailstone resistance and some panels can handle 35mm, but as we know, severe weather is increasing globally and large hailstone events are increasingly common.
I designed a retractable array system a few years ago for my own use. Maybe I should market it…
Check these hailstones out:
http://www.theweatherprediction.com/severe/gianthail/
41
I’ve just watched the Epstein, Dessler debate about Net Zero and the future of energy.
I think Epstein easily won this debate and Koonin was easily voted the winner of previous Dessler debate.
Dessler keeps telling us that W & S are the cheapest energy but Epstein easily argued that Germany and California etc proves that is nonsense.Also SA here in Australia.
I hope Tony and Jo can have a look and try to understand the Dessler argument. It takes about one hour and Epstein was applauded when he mentioned that China used slaves to make the solar panels.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/03/14/epstein-vs-dessler-should-america-rapidly-eliminate-fossil-fuel-use-to-prevent-climate-catastrophe/
60
Tropical cyclones affect all of northern Australia, with the northwest of Western Australia between Broome and Exmouth being the most cyclone prone part of Australia’s coastline.
Where is Twiggy Forrest going to produce “Green Hydrogen” made with solar energy??????
40
Made in China?
Apparently not the steel structure still standing.
40
I’d like to suggest a headline for The Guardian/BBC when they cover this story:
“5 Megawatt solar plant destroyed by Climate Emergency”
50
You’re all acting like this is bad news.
Just remember, the whole point of ‘climate change action’ is to enrich the people involved. This requires a constant theft from the masses, under the guise of research, infrastructure, grants and subsidies and, of course, ‘management fees’ for the pollies and senior public serpents.
Consequently, exploding windmills and shattered solar farms is, for those involved, a godsend, because they then have an excuse to spend more of our money maintaining, replacing and repairing all that unfit-for-purpose equipment.
60
So public serpents pushing solar panels. Snakes in the glass?
50
Naw….? “Hail destroyed most of the three year old Scottsbluff community solar project in Nebraska” Mannn, eh , that’s a great pity ( sarc) ….
a MATCH destroyed THOUSANDS of acres of Fuel reserves for the Bio-fuel power stations. where’s the reporting on that ?
Terrorism, vandalism, produces how much CO2 in the destruction and subsequent/CONSEQUENT restorative works. Huh, they chant “BuildBackBetter”. what it really means is destroy everything first. Fell over this in trying to escape the UK Media morning Dross on TV: Kritisch, investigativ, unerschrocken Are some of the Germans getting the message, or was it sarcasm?
30
“Solar energy might be free but collecting it requires vast acreages of fragile and expensive infrastructure.”
This meme about things being free is interesting to me. People seems to easily ignore the capital cost and opportunity costs of setting up and also ignore that they take on all the maintenance and repair risks.
Its interesting what people will gloss over if it supports the position they want to take.
40
Coal is free. No one writes a cheque to The Big Guy for every ton mined. Wages are an expense and royalties a tax.
30
It may be possible to avoid or get rebates for “Royalties”,.. but you still have to mine the coal, process it ( cleaning, crushing etc) and transport it to the furnace.
Similar costs for Gas also.
All of which incurr costs which Wind, Solar and Hydro do not.
I am not saying those costs are a problem, but we must be realistic with comparisons.
Coal and gas have a “fuel cost” ($/MWh) , which wind, solar, hydro, and even Geothermal , do not .
It may not be a significant amount ,..$2.0/MWh , (0.2c/kWh),.. if that mining/processing cost for coal was $20/ton…
Even if as some critics claim you price coal at its full market value of possibly $100+ / ton,…
….it still only amounts to 1.0c/kWh
…and is totally trivial compared to the retail cost of electricity now at 30+ c/kWh
10
And the huge increase in grid management costs created by an unreliable generation source with no inertia.
40
Divine retribution!
The Lord smites the idols of the pagans.
40
To be honest, I am surprised this has not happened before. I replied to a spam email on solar panels to inquire as to what testing has been carried out on hail resistance and unsurprisingly got no reply.
40
Three years old and destroyed by nature, is Gaiia trying to tell us something.
Oh well, grind them up and use it as roadbase.
40
Apparently, they contain cadmium and other nasties, so you don’t want that crap leaking into the water course !
30
Here is a list of nasties that a typical PV panel contain. It is itemised in a list to comply with RoHS via the EU Directives 2011/65/EU and 2015/863 which restrict the use of the 10 substances below in the manufacture of specified types of electrical equipment.
Substance Concentration
Lead 0.1%
Mercury 0.1%
PBB (Polybrominated Biphenyls) 0.1%
PBDE (Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers) 0.1%
Hexavalent Chromium 0.1%
Cadmium 0.01%
DEHP (Bis (2-Ethylhexl) phthalate) 0.1%
BBP (Benzyl butyl phthalate) 0.1%
DBP (Dibutyl phthalate) 0.1%
DIBP (Diisobutyl phthalate) 0.1%
10
A). 45º panels shed rain, snow and hail quite well. I’ve not had a problem in 15+ years. A good angle for Sydney is perpendicular to the winter solstice. On June 21st our Sun reaches only 36º above horizon. On Dec 21st the Sun rises to 79º above horizon and is intense so it does not matter if my panels are at 45º, – they still receive enough sun-light.
B). I’m guessing the Nebraska mob used cheap panels with thin glass.
10