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Ask HN: Who has experience of setting up / running solar farms?

• deleted 8y ago
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• mchannon 8y ago
  There are a few cautionary tales: Around the turn of the century, Southern Company (Alabama Power) decided to be forward-thinking and put forward one of the first large-scale solar farms using unproven thin film technology, and took a huge writedown when the panels failed and underperformed in a few short years. So the first takeaway is that not all solar panels are created equal. Some have 30 year warranties and some last 30 years. PV doesn't maintain itself. Some panels inevitably fail and need to be changed out. Weed control has to be put in place. Compared to, say, farming corn, PV is very low maintenance, but it's not zero-maintenance. So you need a staff to watch over it, maybe brush the snow off... Another aspect is the question of land value. Land is not worthless, and if it's land that has other uses, PV panels might not be the best thing to put on it. Non-PV (solar thermal) is a totally different animal, with severe issues with cooking birds, but the potential to provide dispatchable power well after the sun goes down. The duck curve is also rearing its ugly head. California's about maxed out for PV capacity without running into constant wintertime power surpluses, where it better hope Arizona wants to get paid to take the noontime surplus. PG&E, S.C.Ed, and the other major California utilities need to figure out pretty quick that home-based PV needs to have governors to disconnect them from the grid at noontime when the grid is full, much as some require for air conditioners. Expect larger-scale and longer-term duck curve problems to start showing up as PV saturates.
  • lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    Duck curve sounds so much more dubious than swan neck or s-curve - I like it
• deleted 8y ago
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